Court Physician

When it comes to those in power, it's not enough to make do with public health professionals like everyone else: to those in the highest echelons of government, only a private physician will do... and in some cases, only one who can be exclusively employed to care for the head of state.

With this in mind, the Court Physician often commands considerable influence within the government, being entrusted with the personal safety of the ruler and the preservation of the governing body's deepest, most scandalous secrets. If the ruler has a family, the Court Physician's duties will often encompass their care and wellbeing as well. For this reason and many more, such doctors are also under immense pressure: should the head of state fall ill or even die, the physician may be blamed, either for failure or for outright treason - with hideous penalties in store.

Court Physicians occupy a very dangerous position, especially among more volatile heads of state, who may not be averse to taking out their frustrations on their doctors in response to a worrying diagnosis.

Depending on the government's overall effectiveness and health, the Court Physician may be a Mad Doctor, a Dr. Feelgood, or a Super Doc. If magic is a given in the setting and the healing arts are exclusively mystical in nature, this trope can overlap with Court Mage.

---

Examples

Anime and Manga

• In One Piece, the Drum Kingdom is well-renowned for having some of the most skilled doctors in the entire Grand Line, and twenty of their best were chosen to serve as the king's personal physicians while the rest were either banished or killed. This was done so that the people in the kingdom would have no choice but to submit to the king's whims in order to receive healthcare. They actually despised the king but had no other choice if they wanted to continue their work and research.

Comic Books

• In the Marvel 1602 continuity, Dr Stephen Strange is the court physician to Queen Elizabeth I, no easy task given her failing health. Despite the change in setting, though, he's still essentially Doctor Strange and thus also serves as an unofficial Court Mage to his monarch - making him the best-equipped to investigate Virginia Dare's strange condition. Tragically, Elizabeth is assassinated by Otto Von Doom, leaving James I on the throne; soon after, Strange ends up being jailed for witchcraft. Virginia desperately tries to plead for his life, but in the end, James gleefully orders Strange executed for treason instead.

Fan Works

• In The Land of What Might-Have-Been, professional mage-surgeon Dr Kiln serves as the personal physician to the Great Mentor of the Deviant Nations. Given that his employer is old, infirm, and not above straying onto the battlefield, he's got his work cut out for him. However, the Mentor also enjoys sending him to care for vital personnel like Elphaba - who usually doesn't want his help or appreciate being covertly dosed with performance-enhancing drugs on the Mentor's instructions. Consequently, Kiln is left a bit exasperated by the fact that both of his patients seem to have a death wish, forcing him to work overtime on the battlefield to save their lives. He's actually the alternate universe equivalent of Boq, while the Mentor is none other than the alternate Glinda.
• The Triptych Continuum gives us The Doctors Bear (Vanilla and Chocolate), Royal Physicians. In Equestria's case, the posting was recently revived after a major health scare, and the unicorns who contributed to the solution were asked to hold it. They're responsible for keeping the Princesses in good condition, and that means they had to be told certain secrets, like the fact that there's no such thing as a naturally-born alicorn. It's something of a high-stress occupation, especially since having both siblings fall ill at the same time means the doctors become responsible for saving the world — and in the name of preventing that circumstance, they do have a limited capacity to issue medically-based orders, to keep their patients out of needless danger. And there's also the ongoing problem of having to figure out how an alicorn body actually works...

Film

• The Last King of Scotland charts the career of the fictitious Dr Nicholas Garrigan, personal physician to Ugandan President Idi Amin. Having taken a shine to the young doctor during a chance encounter, Amin has him attend not only to his own health but that of his family, while also allowing him to spend his off-hours working at a hospital. Unfortunately, though Garrigan is rewarded with five-star accommodations, fine clothes, fancy cars, and significant influence with the president, he soon ends up having to confront the human rights violations that ensue as his patient grows steadily more unstable and cruel. By the end, Garrigan is widely hated throughout the country as an unwitting enabler of Amin's madness and treated as little more than a pet for the president to amuse himself with.
• The Madness of King George, as the 1994 film adaptation of the 1991 play, introduces Doctor Francis Willis to treat the King's worsening mental health, which he does. The King makes a recovery, much to the chagrin of his son, the Prince of Wales, and other conniving weasels in Parliament. Sadly. this doesn't last: the King would have a relapse, becoming unfit to govern by 1810.

Literature

• City of No End: Odham Kendar keeps a doctor of the Medical Cabal in his court at nearly all times, due to suffering from hereditary epilepsy which he would like to keep secret.
• Discworld: Played with in "Feet of Clay". When the Patrician falls mysteriously ill, Commander Vimes doesn't trust a doctor to attend to Lord Vetinari's health, mostly because nearly all of the Ankh-Morpork medical community consists of quacks who can always claim that a dead patient was "the will of the Gods". Instead, he hires a horse doctor as his physician - because racing horses are valuable, and a horse doctor who can't keep the majority of his patients alive risks having an encounter late at night with somebody telling him that "Mister Chrysophrase is very upset."
• In the Dune saga, Suk doctors are employed by the richest and most powerful families to serve as private physicians. Already highly-regarded for their skills, what makes them truly valuable is their reputation for utter trustworthiness: as part of their training, Suks are conditioned to be incapable of betraying their masters, ensuring that they can never be used as assassins or saboteurs. It's for this reason that only Suk doctors are allowed to attend to the Padishah Emperor and that Dr Wellington Yueh enjoys the total trust of the Atreides family. Unknown to all, Baron Harkonnen has been able to break Yueh's otherwise-infallible conditioning by holding his wife hostage, allowing the Harkonnens to mould him into the perfect traitor within Atreides ranks.
• The Kingkiller Chronicle: The Maer Alvaren retains Caudicus, a University arcanist and alchemist who doubles as Court Mage. He prepares a daily dose of medicine for the Maer, and Kvothe cements his position at court by discovering that it's actually a slow poison.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: One of the duties of the Order of Maesters is to serve the medical needs of the nobility, and as such, a Maester is assigned to each of the kingdom's lords in order to care for them and their families. The heads of the Order also elect a Grand Maester to serve the ruling monarch of the Seven Kingdoms, entrusting him with the health of the royal family and often the members of the Small Council as well. Unfortunately, Maesters are not in possession of a Hippocratic Oath, and follow the orders of their liege lords ahead of ethical concerns: the story kicks off with the dying Jon Arryn being secretly withheld treatment by Grand Maester Pycelle in order to prevent him from revealing the secrets of Queen Cersei.
• In the The Culture novel Inversions, Vossil is the (female) court physician at a court with a Medieval European Fantasy feel and is capable of miraculous cures. Although the other characters she interacts with don't know this, the reader is to understand that she is an operative for The Culture, a post-scarcity science fiction society.
• Dr. Prunesquallor from Gormenghast is the flamboyant, foppish doctor to the House of Groan and, also, seemingly the only physician in the entire castle.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: In "The Wedding of River Song" one sign that the timeline has gone nuts is that Winston Churchill is Holy Roman Emperor and has a Silurian as his personal physician.
• Game of Thrones: Maesters usually fill the role within the Houses of Westeros. So does the Grand Maester at the royal court in King's Landing. Ironically though, the ones who did the most to advance the Maester's rather stagnating medical science (Qyburn and Samwell Tarly respectively) left/were expelled from the order for doing so (Qyburn's experiences were a bit... unethical to say the least).
  • House of the Dragon has Grand Master Mellos. Among other things, it is he who advises the Traumatic C-Section on Queen Aemma and brings an abortifacent tea to Princess Rhaenyra.
• Merlin: Gaius is Uther's court physician, who occasionally shows knowledge of medicine beyond what would be expected for the medieval setting. He's also implied to have been the Court Mage before Uther turned against magic.
• The Great: Doctor Chekov is the physician in service to the Russian royal family. He is quirky and very deadpan, but also willing to act as a Torture Technician if Peter so demands.

Theatre

• The Madness of George III from 1991 has three personal physicians attending the King: Doctors Baker, Pepys, and Warren. Their principal treatment is bloodletting, which was in vogue at the time. Analyzing the King's symptoms is regarded as the theatrics of flim-flam phonies.
• In All's Well That Ends Well, Helena is the daughter of a celebrated physician and is introduced serving as a lady-in-waiting to a Countess. She accompanies the Countess' son, Bertram, who she loves to the French court and applies what she learned from her father to heel the ailing King. In exchange, she asks for Bertram's hand in marriage.

Video Games

• Crusader Kings
  • Crusader Kings II: "The Reaper's Due" DLC allows the player to hire a court physician who can attempt to treat the diseases the DLC also added. Mind you, since it's Middle Ages medicine, any treatments he offers are a crapshoot at best, and if the physician has the mystic trait, he might try to treat the patient by rubbing them with the ashes of sacrificed animals - or decide they're possessed and attempt to drown them, for example. However, if the physician's learning score is high enough, these madcap treatments can actually work.
  • This feature appears again in Crusader Kings III.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, it's possible for you to "volunteer" the services of Arcade Gannon as a personal slave and physician to Caesar. Should Caesar survive his illness and achieve victory over the Mohave, Arcade spends many years unwillingly attending to his new master's health, even becoming valued as a companion for his education and his willingness to argue with Caesar; in the end, Arcade is able to use this as an opportunity to steal a scalpel and disembowel himself. However, if Caesar dies prior to the endgame and Lanius achieves victory in his stead, the Legate quickly tires of Arcade's sarcasm and has him crucified.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: In Katara's final battle with Azula, after Zuko gets shot with Azula's lightning, Katara tries to heal him but Azula makes reference to one before trying to blast her into a pile of ashes.
  Azula: I'd rather the family physician look after Zuzu, if you don't mind!

Real Life

• Roderigo "Roger" Lopes was the court physician of Queen Elizabeth I, up until he was accused of plotting to poison the Queen and was then hanged and quartered. As Lopes was a Portuguese converso of Jewish ancestry,^note His father António, himself court physician to King John III of Portugal, was forced to convert to Catholicism, and young Rodrigo was raised in that faith. He was nevertheless accused of practising crypto-Judaism by the Inquisition in his native Portugal, so he fled to London, where he converted to the Church of England as a matter of convenience. some believe that Lopes and his trial might have influenced the creation character of Shylock from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.
• Adolf Hitler had two:
  • Karl Brandt was the earliest physician of Hitler's inner circle until he was dismissed on the advice of his replacement; he's much better known for his leadership in the T4 euthanasia program.
  • The second was one Theodor Morell, a fashionable doctor with his own practice until he was personally recommended to Hitler. He was nicknamed Reichsspritzenmeister (Reich Master of Injections) due to his use of injections, some containing products such as caffeine, belladonna, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Due to his poor hygiene, obesity, and strange cures, other members of the inner circle thought Morell was a quack; in particular, Albert Speer characterized him as a lazy, careless, opportunistic Dr. Feelgood who quarrelled frequently with Brandt. For good measure, it's likely that Morell's use of highly-addictive stimulants prompted some of Hitler's more questionable strategies over the years and ultimately contributed towards the decline of his mental health.
• The household of Queen Elizabeth II had a Medical Household of several physicians, both generalist and specialist, that worked to preserve her health. Given she lived to 96, it can't be said they weren't diligent.
• Grigori Rasputin made his name as the personal healer of Alexei, the hemophiliac son of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. His ability to supposedly cure the boy's symptoms when no one else could soon earned him the personal ear of the Tsarina. Considering his lowborn status as a Siberian peasant, this made him a number of enemies in the Russian court who despised his influence over the Tsar's family and suspected him of all sorts of unpleasant things, from sexual perversion to charlatanism to treason to witchcraft. Eventually it got to a point where he was assassinated by Russian nobles, which according to legend took many consecutive attempts. Interestingly for this trope, he was also a man of the cloth (a preacher of the Orthodox Church and not, as his popular epithet would lead you to believe, a monk).
• Sir William Gull was the physician in ordinary to the Prince of Wales, and later to Queen Victoria herself. However, despite his success in saving Edward VII from typhoid, Gull is better known as one of the more popular suspects in the case of Jack the Ripper - as seen in From Hell - though it's doubtful that Gull actually killed any of the victims given that he was in his seventies and recovering from one of several strokes at the time.
• Alexander the Great once received a letter claiming that his physician Philip of Acarnania had been bribed to poison him. The next time he fell ill, Alexander told Philip about the letter, remarked that he knew little about medicine but much about men, and demonstrated that he did not believe the accusation by drinking the medicine Philip had brought. His trust was well-placed; he recovered.

---