A sideshow of survival

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Monday, May 4th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. 

Up next, the WORLD History Book… how a carnival sideshow helped to save lives. 

A century ago, many doctors thought premature babies couldn’t be saved. But one man disagreed.

WORLD’s Lauren Canterberry takes us to Coney Island.

LAUREN CANTERBERRY: Lucille Horn and her twin sister were born prematurely in New York in 1920. Her sister died, and Horn told Story Corps she had to fight to survive.

LUCILLE HORN: My father said I was so tiny he could hold me in his hand. I think I was only about two pounds.

At the time, hospitals were ill-equipped to care for premature babies and many doctors believed that trying to keep them alive was pointless. Some said they were “weaklings” and not worth spending time and money to save them.

But Horn’s father was determined to save his daughter.

HORN: When I was born, my father was looking for a blanket or a towel to wrap me up in, and somebody said, “where are you going?” And he said, “I’m taking her to the incubator in Coney Island.”

The incubator was part of Martin Couney’s exhibit at New York City’s Coney Island. Horn said her parents first saw it on their honeymoon.

CLAIRE PRENTICE: There was the infant incubator exhibit, where Martin Couney would exhibit premature babies. 

Claire Prentice is a journalist and author who researched Couney and his exhibits for her book Miracle at Coney Island.

PRENTICE: You’d see these big incubators that are kind of like probably about the height of a person, a little glass and steel box on legs.

There, Couney and a team of nurses and doctors cared for premature babies whose parents came from miles away looking for help.

PRENTICE: It looked like a little hospital ward, and it was certainly run very strictly and very ethically.

Martin Couney gets this idea likely from seeing exhibits, cause there were exhibits like this in France and other parts of Europe.

Paris obstetrician Stephane Tarnier invented the first modern incubator in 1880. The primary goal was to keep babies warm—a problem for all newborns who can’t yet regulate body temperature.

Tarnier’s successor, Dr. Pierre Budin, helped refine the design and publicize its effectiveness in 1888. But the medical establishment remained skeptical of the devices, so Budin displayed them at the Berlin World’s Fair in 1896.

Couney claimed to have worked there alongside Budin … formulating his idea to create his own incubator exhibits.

PRENTICE: He claimed that he’d studied medicine with all the kind of leading doctors in this area. That he’d studied in Leipzig and Berlin.

But during her research, Prentice discovered that Couney had immigrated to the United States in 1888, at just 19 years old. Far too young to have as extensive an education as he claimed.

PRENTICE: His story kind of falls apart when you start to look at the dates and what he claimed he’d done. And he was always quite evasive about his early life.

The most shocking discovery Prentice made—there is no evidence that Couney ever met the requirements to become a physician. Here, or in Germany where he said he’d studied.

PRENTICE: He doesn’t actually initially refer to himself as Dr. Couney. He had just surrounded himself with people who he then learned from. And I think it just kind of stuck, and then he adopts the title himself.

By 1930, Couney was referring to himself as a doctor. Prentice believes that may have been to give legitimacy to his incubator exhibits. His facilities garnered national attention and leading doctors regularly sent premature babies to him for care.

Couney initially operated two exhibits in Coney Island, another in Atlantic City, and at fairs and expositions across the country. He had been saving babies for decades, but incubators still did not reach widespread use in the U.S. until the early 1940s.

Couney gained respect in the medical community, but not everyone believed his exhibits were ethical. Early in his career, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children accused him of exploiting babies.

PRENTICE: He wasn’t averse to showman’s tricks of, “let’s get the babies dressed up in clothes that are too big for them to emphasize just how tiny they are.”

Some people, you know, might say he was just exploiting them and making money. But he was constantly plowing his profits back into his exhibit.

The money Couney made off of the exhibits went directly into funding the facilities and his staff, and no parent ever paid for their child’s care. 

Police never found any evidence of mistreatment, and Couney continued his work. By his own reports he saved 6,500 of the 8,000 babies brought to him over the course of four decades.

PRENTICE: There’s no way to verify if that’s true or not, but all the anecdotal evidence and the later, rather more rigorous record keeping suggests that he did have a very high rate of survival, you know. Certainly well over 50%.

By the time he closed his last exhibit in 1943, incubators had gained broad use in mainstream hospitals, due in large part to Couney’s work. He died in 1950.

Lucille Horn credits him for her own long life:

HORN: Ninety-four years later, here I am. All in one piece. And I’m thankful to be here.

Horn passed away in 2017 at the age of 96.

Over a century after his methods first gained fame and notoriety, Prentice says Couney’s work undoubtedly changed neonatal care for the better.

PRENTICE: He did a lot to publicize the plight of these tiny babies and to show they could be saved and should be saved.

And yeah, to have saved thousands of lives, and then you think of all the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and just all these people walking the earth who would not be here if it weren’t for Martin Couney.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Lauren Canterberry.

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