WITH the coronavirus pandemic currently filling just about every news bulletin, it might be appropriate to look back at the significant part Worcester has played in the health of the nation over the centuries.

For it was in the boardroom of the City’s Royal Infirmary in Castle Street (now part of Worcester Uni) that the British Medical Association was formed in July, 1832.

The driving force behind this coming together of what was described at the time as “more than 50 medical gentlemen”, a rather quaint description of the Midland’s top doctors and physicians, was Charles Hastings, a Worcester medical man of such boundless energy and enthusiasm that his entry into a meeting was once described by a contemporary as having “the velocity of a steam carriage”.

Tall and amiable, he was the ninth child of 15 of the Rectory of Martley, the Rev James Hastings, and his wife, but the church was not for young Charles. Instead he gained an apprenticeship to two apothecaries at Stourport on Severn in 1810 and only 18 months later, after also attending Joshua Brookes School of Anatomy in London, was appointed a house surgeon at Worcester Infirmary.

After three years there he moved to Edinburgh to study medicine, but the Scottish climate proved too much and he was invalided home with severe catarrhal inflammation of the lungs, the same condition that had killed five of his family in childhood and was later to claim four more.

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Nevertheless Charles recovered and went back to Edinburgh to qualify in 1818. He then returned to Worcester to take up an appointment as a general physician and for the rest of his life his medical practice was based in the city.

No doubt encouraged by his own experience, Hastings soon gained recognition as a leading authority on diseases of the chest and he proved so popular his practice expanded to cover large parts of Worcestershire and into the adjoining counties. As s student Charles Hastings had been one of the first to use a microscope and as a consultant he was a pioneer of the stethoscope.

He began a journal, the none too snappily named Midland Medical Journal And Surgical Reporter And Topographical and Statistical Journal, with the aim of bringing together in a literary bond the scattered practitioners in the West Midlands.

The success of this publication gave him the standing and encouragement to lay plans for the foundation of the BMA. And so came the meeting at Worcester Infirmary in 1832.

Hastings’ organisation was originally called the Provincial Medical Association, but adopted the title of the defunct British Medical Association in 1855 and led the way in maintaining and recording doctor’s standards, improving medical practices and instigating compulsory vaccination.

Charles Hastings died at his home Barnards Green House, Malvern in 1866, but his legacy has lived on ever since.