Charles West was born in London on 8 August 1816. His father was a Baptist lay preacher who in 1821 became a minister of a Baptist congregation in Buckinghamshire where he also ran a school for young boys. Charles received his first education in his father's school. When he was fifteen, Charles West became an apprentice to a Mr. Gray, a general practitioner of Amersham who had also been an apothecary in a hospital. West In 1833, he entered as a medical student at St. Bartholomew's Hospital where he remained two years with good results and some awards. When, in 1835, the theological opinions of his father prevented him to transfer to Oxford University he decided to complete his medical education in Continental Europe. So, he went to study in Bonn, then in Paris and finally in Berlin where he earned his Medical Degree in September 1837. Then, between 1838 and 1839, he spent almost a year in Dublin working at the Rotunda Hospital and at the Meath Hospital, highly renowned at the time for the clinical glamour of Robert Graves and William Stokes.
Professional career
Back in London, West, after some years as a Clinical Clerk at St. Bartholomew’s, in 1842 was appointed physician to the Universal Dispensary for Children in Waterloo Road, then lecturer in midwifery at the Middlesex Hospital in 1845 and later again lecturer in midwifery also at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. He became more and more involved in the medical problems of children and the first edition of his Lectures on the diseases of infancy and childhood was a great success and gave him sudden fame.
The Hospital for Sick Children
After some unfortunate attempts to transform the Waterloo Dispensary for children into a hospital, he decided to start a fundraising campaign in order to establish in London a hospital specifically for children. Also due to his remarkable oratorical gifts, West’s campaign had success and, in the spring of 1851, a little hospital with ten beds was opened at 49 Great Ormond Street, in a house that had belonged to Richard Mead. In 1854, after three years of activity, Charles West - who was the first physician of the hospital - could describe the initial success of the structure. He also took advantage from this success to boost research funds in view of further enlargement: Thanks to his tireless activity, the hospital continued to grow in size and prestige, becoming until today one of the world's leading pediatric facilities.
In 1877, following a disagreement with the Hospital’s management committee, West’s collaboration with Great Ormond Street Hospital came to an end. West believed that the heart of the disagreement was his conversion to Catholicism which led the Committee to think that he ‘could not be trusted for the future’. It must be added, however, that West, along with many qualities, had always had a difficult character, as he had already expressed, for example, in his years of collaboration with the St Bartholomew's Hospital. His self-defense, along with his Christian vision of a pediatrician's mission, was fully mentioned in the obituary published after his death in the British Medical Journal: From 1880, he became more and more uncomfortable with London's climate and decided to practice in Nice during the winters. In 1891 a bad attack of neuralgia began to affect his health, even if he continued to devote himself to the profession and to sick children until shortly before his death, occurred in Paris on 19 March 1898. His last days were remembered by a friend of him, Dr. R. L. Bowles: Charles West married twice. From his first marriage he had a son and a daughter. He was buried in the cemetery of Chislehurst in the London Borough of Bromley.
