Charles Hastings (English physician)

[1][2][3] He was also a notable lifelong philanthropist, investing his own money in new housing designed to improve public health and founding the Worcester Museum of Natural History.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[citation needed] The new housing he had helped to introduce, for example in Copenhagen Street – now demolished in turn – was having a dramatic effect on health with the death rate dropping by 45% in a decade.