![]() (A recorded interview with Allen, from the Coney Island History project, can be heard here.)Ĭouney always claimed a higher purpose for his summertime exhibits - to show how a marvelous new technology could save fragile children, and, in so doing, to prod a reluctant medical establishment to embrace that technology. ![]() Couney came to the hospital and spoke to my mother and she agreed to put me under his care.”Īllen spent three months on exhibit at Luna Park. “My parents knew about the incubator baby “sideshow ” in Coney Island and were reluctant to send me there,” she wrote. Beth Allen, who was born in a hospital in Brooklyn at 1 pound 10 ounces, recalls her own story via email. Couney’s exhibit, and that’s where I stayed for about six months.” (Listen to the entire interview here, including Horn’s recollection of going back to Coney Island years later and meeting Dr. The doctor said there’s not a chance in hell that she’ll live, but he said, ‘But she’s alive now,’ and he hailed a cab and took me to Dr. “I’m taking her to the incubator in Coney Island. But Horn’s father, who had seen one of Couney’s exhibits on his honeymoon, bundled tiny Lucille up and took her out of the hospital. “I couldn’t live on my own, I was too weak to survive … You just died because you didn’t belong in the world.” Horn said. Baby Lucille was given no chance to live by her doctor. In a wonderful interview recorded by Storycorps and aired on NPR, a former incubator baby from one of Couney’s exhibits described how fragile she was at birth: “My father said I was so tiny, he could hold me in his hand,” said 95 year-old Lucille Horn, who was born prematurely in 1920 at the shockingly low birth weight of under two pounds. According to historian Jeffrey Baker, Couney’s exhibits “offered a standard of technological care not matched in any hospital of the time.” ![]() Photograph is courtesy of Beth Allen.Ĭouney never charged parents for the care he provided, which also included rotating shifts of doctors and nurses looking after the babies. (In the early 1900s, preemies had very high mortality rates, and often weren’t expected to live.) Couney’s own daughter was born prematurely, and she too spent time in one of her father’s Coney Island exhibits.Ī picture of Beth Allen and Martin Couney taken in 1941 at Luna Park, from the Coney Island History Project web site. Many of the infants in the exhibits came to Couney from local maternity wards that couldn’t care for them. Visitors paid a few coins to enter and would approach rows of incubators along the wall, peering through the glass windows at the tiny, shriveled preemie babies living inside. He opened a second at the neighboring Dreamland soon after. ![]() Couney first saw these new glass and metal incubators keeping premature babies alive and decided to import them to the United States, where they were extremely rare.Ĭouney’s first incubator baby exhibit on Coney Island was at Luna Park, one of several amusement parks along the boardwalk. It was in 1896, at the Berlin Exposition that the French-born Dr. Photograph is courtesy of Beth Allen.Ī second generation of European obstetricians refined the incubators, adding individual thermostats and better ventilation systems, and spread the word about these new technologies through demonstrations at various expositions and Worlds Fairs. While other European obstetricians pointed out that Tarnier’s first devices were hardly different from the hot water bottles and blankets used in many maternity wards, Baker writes, “such criticisms missed Tarnier’s most important contribution, which was to convince his colleagues that incubators (of whatever design) really made a difference.”Ī picture of the Coney Island Incubator sideshow facade at Luna Park ca. Tarnier thought he could use a similar device to save the premature babies dying of hypothermia in Parisian hospitals. Stéphane Tarnier, who witnessed an incubator warming baby chickens at a Parisian zoo in the late 1870s, according to medical historian Dr. The first doctor to use incubators for preemies was French obstetrician Dr. Couney created and ran incubator-baby exhibits on the island from 1903 to the early 1940s, and though he died in relative obscurity, he was one of the great champions of this lifesaving technology and is credited with saving the lives of thousands of the country’s premature babies. Martin Couney, an enigmatic figure in the history of medicine. Beyond the Four-Legged Woman, the sword swallowers, and “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” was an entirely different exhibit: rows of tiny, premature human babies living in glass incubators.īarkers, including a young Cary Grant, called out to passersby, enticing visitors to come see the preemies. ![]()
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