When I think of carnival sideshows, a lot of very specific visuals come to mind: contortionists, strong men, and rows of premature babies in incubators.
You were expecting perhaps sword swallowers?
Today’s Moment of Science… Martin Couney and the carnival incubator babies.
Once upon a time if you were born premature, your best medical options for survival included prayer and… well that was it. Their degree of prematurity and their weight most heavily factored into a newborn’s chances of survival.
In the late 1880s in Paris, Dr. Stephane Tarnier developed an incubator for use in treating premature babies, the idea hatched from watching similar heated boxes used in chicken farming. However, he realized that unlike the chick’s environment of an eggshell, with our exposed and under-developed windbags, we needed more than just stable temperatures. An incubator for humans could act as a fully controlled environment to allow lung and organ growth while preventing infection.
The problem? Even when Tarnier demonstrated a sharp reduction in infant mortality at his hospital, people kinda thought cooking the baby low and slow was bonkers.
Tarnier’s idea was not to fall away into obscurity though. An assistant who succeeded him, Pierre-Constant Budin, pushed forward with the incubators.
Here’s where shit gets a bit murky.
Martin Couney apparently studied under Budin. Apparently.
A Polish immigrant born in 1869, Couney said he came to America when he was nineteen. Sometime after that, he set up shop as a doctor. There’s never been any real proof found that he went to medical school. Hell, it’s hard to find proof that he studied under Budin, but I’m dropping that one into the “accepting as true” column, because he picked up all of Budin’s knowledge on incubators somehow.
He took that knowledge with him from France back to the US, and did the most American thing with it possible: put it on display and monetized it. Opening in Coney Island in 1903, you can practically hear someone calling out ‘step right up folks,’ along with these very real slogans:
“Live Babies in Incubators!”
“Baby Incubators!”
And my personal favorite…
“Infantorium!”
Though the signs sound like any other carnival barker’s cry for attention, Couney ran a serious operation. Babies so sick they needed constant minding weren’t turned away. Wet nurses were on strict diets to keep a healthy milk supply. Parents were never charged for the care of their children, the entire operation being funded by ticket sales.
Understanding the mixed reactions to Couney’s work requires a look at the backdrop of the time. This was the era when eugenics was popular (good lord we really have fucked up everything, haven’t we?). The thought of saving these weaklings who would pass on their defects was antithetical to the thinking of the day. Eugenicists, and a lot of medical professionals at the time, would sooner have left these babies to die with no intervention. The medical establishment as a whole generally looked at preemies as not worth the work because of the high cost and low chances of survival.
So when the accusations were floated that he was exploiting these children and their families for profit, it’s possible they thought he would collect ticket sales and leave a lot of parents heartbroken. The idea that it would succeed was so preposterous, they even suggested he was a baby thief.
It’s likely nobody expected him to have an 85% success rate in saving preemies.
It’s been reported that, through the course of his career, he saved around 6,500 pre-term babies, mostly at Coney Island.
For having been accused of being in this for the money, Couney was damn near broke at the end of his career. As admission sales were the only source of income, when people stopped coming to see the babies, there was no way to keep afloat. They closed up shop in 1943, fortunately as hospitals started adopting incubator technology. Couney died seven years later in 1950.
An American doctor made a film with the tagline, “Kill Defectives, Save the Nation,” during Martin Couney’s time. It’s likely Couney wasn’t a doctor. But if the medical profession wasn’t in the business of saving people, maybe a doctor wasn’t what we needed.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, still struggling with the concept of eugenicist doctors.
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