George Royal was born in Alford, Massachusetts on July 15, 1853. He attended high school in Willimantic, Connecticut, followed by Amherst College from 1874 through 1875. Dr. Royal received an honorary M.S. from Amherst College in 1929. During the 1870s, Royal taught at a private school in Coventry, Connecticut, and served as principal at East Hampton High School in Connecticut. He received his Medical Doctor degree from the New York Homeopathic Medical College in 1882 and moved to Des Moines, Iowa. He served as president of the Des Moines school board from 1888 to 1892.

In 1892 Dr. Royal was appointed professor of Materia Medica and Therapeutics within the Homeopathic Medical Department at the State University of Iowa. In 1899 he was named dean of the Department of Homeopathic Medicine, succeeding Dr. James G. Gilchrist. Dr. Royal was active in societies, having served as treasurer of the Iowa Homeopathic Medical Society in 1901 and as president of the American Institute of Homeopathy in 1905. He was editor of the Iowa Homeopathic Journal for a number of years. In 1919 he was appointed head of the SUI Department of Homeopathic Materia Medica and Therapeutics, and served until his resignation in the spring of 1921. Royal's research focused on the efficacy of homeopathic remedies. He authored four books on the subject between 1920 and 1930 with two of these titles having later editions. Text-Book of Homeopathic Materia Medica was published in 1920 and 1962 and Homeopathic Therapy of Diseases of Brain and Nerves was published in 1928 and 1992.

George Royal married Ella J. Kingsbury and the couple had one son, Dr. Malcolm A. Royal of Des Moines, Iowa. George Royal died in Des Moines on December 27, 1931.

According to historian Stow Persons, Dean Royal informed President Walter A. Jessup on January 9, 1918, that he would close the Homeopathic College in June 1919, due to a decline in enrollment. Persons posits the decline was in part due to the stricter admission requirements which were adopted following the influential discussions of William R. Boyd, chair of the Board of Education's finance committee, with Abraham Flexner just prior to publication of Flexner's report, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, in 1910. After the college closed in 1919, the Department of Homeopathic Materia Medica and Therapeutics was established within the College of Medicine, with courses in homeopathy listed in the University catalog until 1961.