Series 8 - Addresses and interviews

Dr. Hastings was much in demand as a public speaker throughout his career. In the early 1960s, for example, he often gave more than one a week and by the late 1990s he himself estimated that he had given well over 1,000 addresses. While the majority were delivered at academic and professional gatherings, he also made time to speak at community events, including graduation exercises.

This series contains lists of addresses, correspondence, notes, drafts of addresses, and, often, press coverage. The arrangement is chronological, with correspondence for which accompanying addresses have not survived being arranged in separate files. There is a substantial file of this type for 1963. Interviews are filed at the end of the addresses.

The earliest extant address is his first professional foray on the international scene, at the American Public Health Association conference in October 1954. The theme was administrative practice in relation to the quality of medical care provided under the Ontario Workmen’s Compensation Board. This address and subsequent ones follow the major themes laid out in the earlier series, especially Series 7. Those that were published are filed, for the most part, in Series 7. Some of the addresses are indicated in Appendix 2, which includes entries up to 1994.

After his retirement, Dr. Hastings’ addresses continued to focus primarily on public and community health issues. One, in 1994, was given on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Charles Hastings Co-operative, named after his great-uncle, Toronto’s innovative and pioneering medical officer of health. On another occasion, he spoke about the future of community health centres to the International Conference on Community Health Centres in Montreal (December 1995).

While President of the Canadian Public Health Association in 1996-1997, he travelled widely and was much in demand as a speaker. Four venues included a reception in his honour in Winnipeg, the second National Conference on Communicable Disease Control in Toronto, the World Health Organization’s Intersectional Action for Health conference in Halifax, and the annual general meeting of the Northwest Territories branch of the CPHA in Yellowknife. In 1999, after many years of long distance communication, he flew to Manitoba to address the Hamiota District Health Centre Foundation, and in November was a keynote speaker at the 50th annual conference of the Ontario Public Health Association.

In June 2000, at the annual meeting of the Association of Ontario Health Centres, Dr. Hastings reflected on a turning point in his career in his address, “The Hastings Report – then and now”. This is followed by an address delivered at the opening in October 2001 of the Institute of Population and Health, one of four Toronto-based Institutes of Health Research.

The series concludes with three interviews, one on CBC’s radio and television “Citizen’s Forum” in 1960, a ‘telepole’ on CFTO TV in 1962, and an interview with Jan Brown in February 1997.