Even premature babies face numerous challenges today with all the advantages of modern medicine, so it's easy to imagine how much harder it was for them at the start of the 20th century. The neonatal incubator was the only thing that could give them a fighting chance, but hospitals only began installing these units en masse around 1920–1922. The only alternative for many parents back then was to turn their children into an attraction at Coney Island, New York, and leave them under the care of Martin A. Couney, a mysterious doctor of European origin...
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, amusement parks went to extreme lengths to get people to pay for something they had never seen before. We've previously talked about the human curiosities of P.T. Barnum and explored the secrets of Olga, la Mujer Sin Cabeza, but today it's something very different. There are no tricks or illusions here.
In fact, it's a highly valuable medical resource... that at the dawn of 1900 had to be presented as a kind of 'freak show'. I'm referring to the neonatal incubators of Dr. Martin A. Couney, which operated inside the Dreamland amusement park (Coney Island, New York) and later at Luna Park until the 1940s.
“Martin A. Couney's premature babies”
The first time Couney exhibited his incubators with babies inside was at the Berlin Exposition in 1896. He then went through London and the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, but settled permanently in the United States two years later. The idea was simple: let people pay 25 cents per head to enter the incubator room and see the babies.
The money collected was used to keep the entire attraction running, including 24/7 care for the babies and wet nurses, and he never asked a cent from the parents. Dreamland disappeared due to a massive fire in 1911, but all the babies were transferred to Luna Park.
Of course, not everyone agreed with the attraction, and Couney was a controversial figure. The artistic factor led to dressing the babies in oversized clothing to convey their smallness through the glass, but the doctor always defended himself by saying he was promoting 'the proper care' for premature babies, when in other times 'they would have let them die'.
However, the harshest criticisms point to Couney's credentials as a doctor, which were never able to be verified. Available data suggests he was only 'trained' in the use of incubators by one of the students of Étienne Stéphane Tarnier, the first doctor to regularly apply neonatal units to care for premature infants. Even so, it's estimated that Couney's attraction saved more than 6,500 babies out of a total of 8,000.
Source: Atlas Obscura
