The Incubator Doctor
Odd historical piece at the New York Times this morning. In the early part of the 1900s, a doctor set up incubators for premature babies and displayed them for a quarter. It would appear he did it for money and because these babies may have died otherwise. Link. Excerpts:
The babies were lined up under heaters and they breathed filtered air. Few of them weighed more than three pounds. They shared the Boardwalk there on Coney Island with Violetta the Armless Legless Wonder, Princess WeeWee, Ajax the Sword-Swallower and all the rest. From 1903 until the early 1940's, premature infants in incubators were part of the carnival.
Dr. Martin A. Couney, the so-called Incubator Doctor, took his popular display of premature babies to the World's Fair in Chicago in 1933.
It cost a quarter to see the babies, and people came again and again, to coo and to gasp and say look how small, look how small. . .
All those quarters bought a big house at Sea Gate for Dr. Martin A. Couney, the man who put the Coney Island babies on display. He died broken and forgotten in 1950 at 80 years old. The doctor was shunned as an unseemly showman in his time, even as he was credited with popularizing incubators and saving thousands of babies. History did not know what to do; he was inspired and single-minded, distasteful and heroic, ultimately confounding.
