In the primary half of the 20 th century, 1000’s of tiny babies lived their first few weeks among the many smell of hot dogs and the sound of carnival music as they desperately fought for his or her lives.
Dismissed as ‘weaklings’ and given little likelihood of survival, many premature infants were simply left to die.
But one man, Dr Martin Couney, had the technology, the know-how and the motivation to save lots of them. So, with parents’ permission, he took pre-term babies from their homes and hospitals and admitted them to his child hatchery – a precursor to today’s neo-natal unit.
It was through his own experience of getting a premature baby along with his wife, who was a nurse, that Dr Couney recognised the necessity for sustenance, human contact and heat to survive.
He decided to establish rooms filled with incubators where they may very well be kept alive. Nonetheless, these rooms weren’t in hospitals – they were in fairs and expositions all over the world.
However it was an expensive operation and the doctor controversially decided to charge people money to return from the streets and ogle on the 2lb infants under the catchline ‘all of the world loves a baby’.
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He soon became often called ‘The Incubator Doctor’, but his work riled the medical establishment.
The Recent York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children accused Dr Couney of exploiting children, while an editorial within the Lancet warned the show exhibited babies ‘just as they could have exhibited marionettes, fat women, or any form of catch-penny monstrosity’.
Dr Couney told reporters on the time that he had medical training in Leipzig and Paris, but creator Dawn Raffel has since found there was no record of him at German medical schools, no German doctoral thesis within the National Library of Medicine’s holdings and no US medical licence for him.
Explaining the rationale behind the person’s extreme circus show, Dawn, who has written The Strange Case of Dr Couney, told Metro: ‘Infant mortality on the time was extremely high, hospitals were terrible and most of the people would have preferred to provide birth at home. There weren’t numerous resources for newborns basically and there wasn’t the dedicated nursing needed to maintain a baby alive in an incubator.
‘He was begging for money on a regular basis. However it was hard to persuade people due to eugenics movement in the US on the time. They were focused on constructing higher babies.’
That meant tiny weak ones were simply left to die until Dr Couney stepped in and made a profession along with his hatchery in expositions, world fairs and amusement parks each here within the UK and the US, with shows in London in 1897 and Nebraska in 1888.
The doctor then arrange his spectacle on the Atlantic City boardwalk and Coney Island – alongside other circus ‘freak show’ acts.
It was an enormous success. On the 1933 to 1934 Chicago World’s Fair, the incubator pavilion drew in 1,250,000 visitors.
At Coney Island, The Recent Yorker described Dr Couney watching ‘the crowds flocking into his concession’ and noted the loyal ‘repeaters’ who picked a favorite baby and got here back weekly. One woman returned once every week for thirty-six seasons.
Medically, Dr Couney’s results were miraculous. While the babies had a 90% mortality rate in hospital, that they had an 85% to 90% survival rate when housed within the incubator exhibit. This success got here without the families having to pay a penny for his or her babies’ care.
‘He was a visionary. But numerous the smarts got here from the nurses who were doing many of the work’, Dawn explains. In addition to clinical nurses, Dr Couney hired wet nurses to breastfeed the newborns – sometimes a mother of one in every of the babies within the show – and a cook to feed them three square meals a day.
If he caught one in every of them eating a hotdog or drinking a soda, Couney would fire them on the spot as he was keen that their weight loss program must be healthful. The doctor also kept the rooms spotless and practiced excellent hygiene across the premises.
While the preemies that were treated in hospitals within the Nineteen Forties and early Nineteen Fifties continuously went blind, babies treated in Martin Couney’s sideshows retained their eyesight.
It wasn’t until the mid Nineteen Fifties, after the showman’s death, that doctors discovered the rationale – overuse of oxygen. It was oxygen toxicity that caused blindness in singer Stevie Wonder, who was born six weeks premature in 1950.
Dr Couney was undeniably a controversial character. Child protection charities accused him of exploiting the babies and detractors said he was a mercenary, because he made a superb living from the work. Meanwhile, as Dawn discovered, his credentials were questionable.
‘He made the medical career uncomfortable on the time, because he was a showman, a carnival guy. He didn’t see any conflict between his own self interests and saving babies,’ she explained.
‘In researching the book, I went through numerous old newspaper articles and there have been so many inconsistencies. He said he invented the incubator, which he didn’t. He said he was trained in Leipzig and Paris. But he wasn’t even in Europe at the moment. So numerous that stuff he made up.’
Nonetheless, no doubt, his work was each vital and revolutionary. Dr Couney’s incubator shows saved the lives of an estimated 6,500-7000 babies, lots of whom are still alive today and have spoken to Dawn about their unconventional start in life.
‘It may well make you uneasy to take into consideration. It’s as if there have been a cure for breast cancer but you could have to be in a circus to receive it. A number of the surviving patients who I talked to said their parents were extremely embarrassed by it, or hesitant or appalled by having to do that, and yet, he saved their lives.
‘So how do you weigh those two things?’ asked Dawn. ‘At the identical time, there wasn’t one other solution to do it on the time. You might consider it as medical crowdfunding.’
Dr Couney’s legacy continues today. Dr Julius Hess, a paediatrician from Chicago who worked with him, took what he’d learned back into hospitals who then began to speculate in incubators and neonatal care, earning Dr Hess the repute of being the daddy of American neonatology.
So was Dr Couney an exploitative showman or inspirational visionary? Surely the ultimate say should go to those tiny babies now grown, parents and grandparents themselves.
‘A few of them felt it was really cool, and a few felt type of happy with it,’ said Dawn. ‘They felt special, because they were in his show as a baby. But most of all, they felt they survived for this reason guy.’
A version of this text was first published in November 2025.
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