Labor Politics

Reassessing a Boston practitioner's place in the healing arts.


By Katherine A. Powers


"Midwifery and Medicine in Boston: Walter Channing, M.D., 1786–1876," by Amalie M. Kass (Northeastern University Press; Boston; 2001; 400 pages; $40)

It is excruciating even to imagine what giving birth in Boston meant in 1811, when Walter Channing began his practice.

Both anesthesia and antiseptic precautions were unknown. Like other doctors, Channing attended his patients dressed in his street clothes, hands unwashed, having quite possibly come straight from the bedside of a woman who was dying of puerperal fever.

Trained in the grand tradition of “heroic medicine,” however, he was liberal in treating the contagion he spread, with, as Amalie M. Kass enumerates, “bleeding, emetics, cathartics, purgatives, diuretics, blisters, cupping, fomentations, catheters, injections, and enemas.”

In Midwifery and Medicine in Boston: Walter Channing, M.D., 1786–1876, Kass presents a detailed look at a branch of medicine that, scientifically, changed little during the career of one of Boston’s foremost practitioners. Except for his early use of ether, Channing was not a pioneer in medical practice. Indeed, he lagged behind many in advocating clinical teaching and recognizing a doctor’s role in spreading puerperal fever. But it is just this representativeness that makes the portrait all the more revelatory of the social and professional milieu of Boston medicine.

Although medicine made slow scientific progress during Channing’s career, as a profession it embarked upon a crucial institutional transformation. Though again not a prime mover, Channing was connected with the establishment of a number of Boston’s most noteworthy medical institutions: the New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston Lying-In Hospital.

Channing’s personal life was immediately touched by the inadequacy of his profession, most notably in the deaths of both his wives soon after childbirth. Moreover, like most of those who shaped the Boston of his day, he was born into the Brahmin caste, New England’s “harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes described it. The class inherited, along with family connections, a strong sense of public duty and a commitment to social improvement.

Born in Newport, Rhode Island, a decade after the signing of the Declaration of Independence—and a grandson of one of the signers—Walter Channing lost his father when he was seven years old. (Kass believes this tragedy might account for the streak of melancholy that marked Channing’s nature and the episodes of ungovernable grief that engulfed him after the deaths of his wives.)

His widowed mother moved the family to Boston, and the young man eventually followed his brothers to Harvard. He was soon dismissed from school for refusing to apologize for his part in the “Rotten Cabbage” rebellion, a student protest against the college’s unwholesome food. Over the next few years, Channing studied medicine as an apprentice in Boston, and at Philadelphia, Edinburgh, and London hospitals.

By the time Channing began his own practice in 1811, midwifery had been professionalized: Male doctors generally replaced female midwives. Channing chose the field because it was comparatively uncrowded, offering him a greater opportunity for distinguishing himself and repairing his finances.

The fact is, as Kass notes, midwifery occupied an awkward place during the years of Channing’s career. Compared with other medical specialties, it was looked down upon for having been the province of women practitioners; it also carried a taint of unseemliness and prurience about it.

Beyond that, the field had a serious disadvantage in institutional medicine, for in it morality and medicine collided. This, as Kass shows most illuminatingly, had real consequences for the establishment of departments in Massachusetts General Hospital after its founding in 1821. Whatever the advantages of creating an obstetrics department as a teaching facility and a public good, the hospital’s trustees would not countenance it.

The trustees believed no modest, respectable woman would tolerate the presence of medical students at her delivery. And, more damning, it seemed clear that such a facility would attract the destitute and the unchaste, thus giving an aura of immorality to the entire institution. As these judicious Bostonians saw it, no decent woman would willingly enter a hospital with such depraved associations, thus jeopardizing the entire establishment. In being home to this view, Kass explains, Boston was far more intransigent than New York or Philadelphia, cities where hospitals had had lying-in departments since 1801 and 1803, respectively.

Finally, in 1832, the Boston Lying-In Hospital was established. Tradition has it that Channing played an instrumental role in its creation. Indeed, he is today celebrated as its founder. Kass, however, whose research has been genuinely heroic, finds no evidence this is true. What is without doubt, though, is that this institution, too, catered to Boston’s notions of respectability, and medical teaching was prohibited within its walls.

The strength of this book is its detailed demonstration of how the practice of medicine is embedded in social understandings. In Boston, morality and medicine, and the social and the scientific, were inextricably linked. The situation is marvelously illustrated again in Kass’s description of the furor caused among doctors by the publication of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous paper on the spread of puerperal fever.

Using statistical evidence, Holmes argued what was later shown to be scientifically true: The deadly postpartum affliction was carried from patient to patient by physicians themselves. For many, including Channing for a time, it was impossible to believe that upstanding men of high calling could be the disseminators of death.

In addition to examining fifty years of Boston medicine, Kass uncovers in Walter Channing himself not just a representative of his social and professional class, but also a poignant figure, beset by personal tragedy and nearly incapacitated by it. Kass’s dedicated recovery of this forgotten man and her recreation of the world he lived in make her book a truly fine contribution to Boston history.

Katherine A. Powers is a freelance writer living in Cambridge. She writes the column “A Reading Life” for the Boston Sunday Globe books section.

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"The Last Witch of Dogtown"
By Francis Blessington
The Curious Traveller Press, 2001

Generations have long whispered about the practice of witchcraft in Dogtown, once a real village on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Now Francis Blessington has used that lore as the basis for an unusual historical novel, one that effectively conjures up daily life in the now-abandoned settlement. Along the way, Blessington vividly demonstrates that not all early New Englanders fit the typical Puritan mold.

Set in 1829, "The Last Witch of Dogtown" recounts the dramatic tale of an unsuccessful clergyman who resorts to witchcraft to save his family and dying village. Granther Halliday is the descendant of a “good yeoman English family.” Expelled from Harvard College for a sacrilegious prank, he is forced to provide for his family under increasingly hardscrabble circumstances.

In fact, a villagewide “battle against poverty” is plunging townspeople into moral and economic difficulties. The combatants include a lively array of personalities, both historic depictions of Gloucester’s earliest residents and purely fictional characters.

Blessington’s homespun dialogue and rich descriptions of the natural world emerge as real strengths in this book, and his austere imagery works to underscore the settlement’s menacing hardships and isolation.

"The Last Witch of Dogtown" is the ninth book by Blessington, a professor of English at Northeastern. The author’s familiarity with wide-ranging locales, used to great effect in previous works, again serves him well in re-creating this curious village. Readers who enjoyed his recent book of poetry, Wolf Howl, will likely relish the haunting scenes depicted in this novel, an admirable addition to the literature of Cape Ann.