dsr wrote:I can believe in a doctor who would overdoes a patient to ease him to death, though I know of others who wouldn't.
But I don't believe in a doctor who would time the injection to the newpaper schedules; I don't believe in a doctor who would know or care enough about newspaper schedules to do that anyway; I don't believe in a conspiracy where any palace or newspaper official would approach a doctor to suggest he do that. And I don't believe in a doctor who would be fool enough to say so.
In any case, newspapers of the day were perfectly capable of running and distributing special editions.
Something I do believe in, is the ability of people (including journalists) to hear an urban myth on the internet and decide that that's a fun tale, let's run with it, no need to check whether it is true, all the people are dead so there's no law of libel. So unless anyone has any viable evidence of the truth, then I don't believe it.
I think that you need to do some proper research on this. It's not just rumour and speculation. The full truth was revealed in 1986, (i.e. 50 years after his death), and was widely publicised.
There are lots of sources for this, but here's the New York times report
The New York Times Archives
As he lay comatose on his deathbed in 1936, King George V was injected with fatal doses of morphine and cocaine to assure him a painless death in time, according to his physician's notes, for the announcement to be carried ''in the morning papers rather than the less appropriate evening journals.''
The fact that the death of a reigning monarch had been medically hastened remained a secret for half a century until the publication today of the notes made at the time by Lord Dawson, the royal physician who recorded that he administered the two injections at about 11 o'clock on the night of Jan. 20, 1936. That was scarcely an hour and a half after Lord Dawson had written a classically brief medical bulletin that declared, ''The King's life is moving peacefully toward its close.''
That ''close'' came in less than an hour after the injections. Lord Dawson, according to his notes, had already taken the precaution of phoning his wife in London to ask that she ''advise The Times to hold back publication.''
And to quote from Dawson's diary for January 20, 1936, (which was never published, so he had no need to exaggerate or sensationalise):
“At about 11 o’clock it was evident that the last stage might endure for many hours, unknown to the patient but little comporting with the dignity and serenity which he so richly merited and which demanded a brief final scene. Hours of waiting just for the mechanical end when all that is really life has departed only exhausts the onlookers and keeps them so strained that they cannot avail themselves of the solace of thought, communion or prayer. I therefore decided to determine the end and injected (myself) morphia gr. 3/4 and shortly afterwards cocaine gr. 1 into the distended jugular vein.”