CHANNING, WALTER

born April 15, 1786, Newport, R.I. died July 27, 1876, Brookline, Mass. U.S. U.S. physician and one of the founders of the Boston Lying-In Hospital (1832), brother of the clergyman William Ellery Channing; he was the first (1847) to use ether as an anesthetic in obstetrics and the first professor of obstetrics at Harvard University (1815). A graduate in medicine (1809) of the University of Pennsylvania, Channing studied in Europe, returning in 1812 to an obstetrical practice. He was a coeditor of the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery and wrote the classic Treatise on Etherization in Childbirth (1848).