Sir Charles Hastings

Sir Charles Hastings (11 January 1794 – 30 July 1866) was a medical surgeon and a founder of the British Medical Association, the BMA, originally Provincial Medical and Surgical Association on 19 July 1832.

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.

Charles Hastings was born at Ludlow in Shropshire, the ninth of fifteen children born into the family of Rev. James Hastings (1756-1856), 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 in 1818, immediately to Worcester Infirmary again. He even declined a lectureship at Edinburgh in order to do so.

Hastings had a close relationship with his home city, Worcester, and although he could have developed an interesting, challenging and rewarding medical career anywhere including London or Edinburgh, he made a conscious decision to invest his career in the locality where he had grown up.

In 1854 he was looking for ways of investing his own money in innovative, purpose-designed living and working accommodation for Worcester's artisans. These 'modern dwellings', as he called them, were well-designed and well-built houses of varied construction types that replaced often cramped, old, crowded, medieval buildings and later cheaply built terraces and town houses which were little more than slums by Hastings' time and places where diseases such as typhus would break out in the right conditions, an all too regular development.

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