Sir Charles Hastings

Sir Charles Hastings (1794 - 1866) was a medical surgeon and a founder of the British Medical Association, the BMA, originally Provincial Medical and Surgical Association on July 19,1832 [Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by P. W. J. Bartrip, ‘Hastings, Sir Charles (1794–1866)’ [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12560] , accessed 28 Feb 2007.] [ [http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/BMAOutlineHistory BMA Website: a brief history] ] .

He was also a notable lifelong philanthropist, investing his own money in new housing designed to improve public health and founding a natural history museum.

Birth & early life

Charles Hastings was born at Ludlow in Shropshire, the ninth of fifteen children born into the family of a Rev. James Hastings, a clergyman who was rector of the church in Bitterley near Ludlow, but about to take up the position of incumbent at Martley in Worcestershire. It was in Worcestershire that he was educated and spent his formative childhood, attending Worcester Grammar School. He was a younger brother of Admiral Sir Thomas Hastings.

Charles was interested in natural history as a young boy and as he matured he was drawn towards the study of medicine, especially after his father suffered an incapacitating accident. In fact it would seem he was quite a precocious student, becoming an apprentice to an apothecary initially then attending anatomy school in London at age sixteen and becoming house surgeon as Worcester Infirmary at eighteen years of age, before entering Edinburgh University at twenty one, where he was elected President of the Royal Medical Society, returning after completing his studies and gaining his medical degree, immediately to Worcester Infirmary again. He even declined a lectureship at Edinburgh in order to do so.

It was Worcester where he was to spend his career.

Early medical career

He was appointed as a physician at Worcester Infirmary in line with his immediate ambition and within one year was President of The Worcester Medical & Surgical Society. His main area of interest was diseases and inflammation of the chest such as Cholera, Pneumonia and general infectious diseases. He was rapidly regarded as the foremost authority locally, to whom other medical practitioners turned for advice and information and to improve their knowledge. Hastings held some very progressive views for his time and had very firm ideas regarding public health. He believed that the government had a responsibility for improving and maintaining the health of the populace and should extend health care to ensure this. After all a healthy Victorian workforce was a productive one.

An early focus of his became what we have coined since as 'occupational health'. He scientifically studied local porcelain workers in Worcester's Royal Worcester porcelain factory, along with other then common trades such as glovers and salt workers. He examined their working conditions, the chemicals and materials they handled and the nature of their daily tasks and habits to assess how best their health and productivity could be improved for the good of all.

Before very long this had evolved into the Provincial Medical & Surgical Association, of which Hastings was a founder and driving force. He could perceive the value of a professional, rigourously maintained medical professional elite setting itself high standards to protect both itself and the public, who up until that time could easily have found themselves or their families health in the hands of 'quacks' and floundering practitioners more focused on their earning ability than medical expertise. For twenty four years he had to fight every step of the way to enable legislation to be introduced to bring about the further establishment of the British Medical Association, the body which continues to oversee the medical profession in Britain today.

Campaigning work in Worcester

Charles Hastings obviously had a close relationship with his home city, Worcester. He could have developed a very interesting, challenging and rewarding medical career anywhere, especially London or Edinburgh but he made a very conscious and obvious decision to invest his career in the locality where he had grown up and the people of Worcester have a great debt to this man.

In 1854 Dr Charles Hastings was seeking to put much of his own money into innovative, purpose designed living and working accommodation for Worcester's artisans. These 'modern dwellings' as he called them were well built, well designed houses of varied construction intended to replace often cramped, very old, crowded, medieval buildings and later cheaply built terraces and town houses which in Worcester were little more than slums by Hastings time where diseases such as Typhus would break out in the right conditions, an all too regular development.

Cholera had broken out in Worcester many times. It spread throughout the city in 1832, claiming many lives and recurred in 1849 and 1853 taking children and workers of all ages. It is said that Hastings attended to people in every outbreak, personally seeing every single case and ministering to the sick and dying with no regard for his own health.

The new housing he had helped to introduce, for example in Copenhagen Street - now sadly demolished in turn - was having a dramatic effect on health with the death rate dropping by 45% in a decade. However he was facing a great reluctance on the part of Worcester City Council to introduce even simple measures, as we see them today, such as introducing clean water to their houses, pumps and streets. In fact it was 1872 before legislation was on the statute books for clean water to be piped into most metropolitan areas, Worcester included.

Sir Charles was also forthright critic of hydropathy, and of the famed Dr James Gully in particular. [Bradley, J., and Depree, M. A Shadow of Orthodoxy? An Epistemology of British Hydropathy, 1840–1858, Medical History, 2003, 47:173–194]

He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1850 for his pioneering work, resolve and social conscience.

Among his children was George Woodyatt Hastings.

He also founded the Worcester museum of Natural History, hoping that it might inspire the younger generations following him to have at their disposal a valuable facility in which they could further their studies and gain an insight into the wonders of the world around them and a greater understanding of how to improve it for the greater good.

Death & legacy

His grave lies in Worcester's Astwood Cemetery, alongside his wife Hannah, who predeceased him by just three months. They had two daughters, and a son who became a local MP. He had lived out the final years of his allotted span in his home in the Malvern Hills and died at age seventy-two safe in the knowledge that what he had been able to achieve in his lifetime was of great value to the wider world as well as that on his very doorstep.

He was at the time of his death Worcester's most respected citizen, the value of his work already appreciated. Today however he could be slipping from the public consciousness and even in his home city he is not as widely spoken of today as say Sir Edward Elgar, maybe Worcester's most celebrated son. Many admirers of Sir Charles Hastings would argue that he has been of the greater value and is worthy of renewed and continued recognition today and in the future.

References

General references

* [http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pagerender.fcgi?artid=1034913&pageindex=1#page "The Life and Times of Sir Charles Hastings, Founder of the British Medical Association (1959)" Reviewed by Cohen Of Birkenhead in "Med Hist". 1960 July; 4(3): 261–262.]
* [http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1844886 "Charles Hastings (1794-1866): Founder of the British Medical Association" by W. H. McMenemey, April 16, 1966]
*"The Life & Times of Sir Charles Hastings (Founder of the British Medical Association)" : William McMenemey.