Martin Couney's Incubator Babies: Coney Island's Hidden Neonatal Ward

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For about 40 years, one of America's most advanced neonatal clinics sat on carnival midways. Incubators began when French obstetrician Stéphane Tarnier saw poultry incubators at the Paris Zoo and had a human version built, but the medical establishment dismissed the idea. Martin Couney, born Michael Cohen in Prussia in 1869, claimed medical degrees from Leipzig and Berlin and training under Pierre Constant Budin, though no record of a medical license exists. Shut out by hospitals, he exhibited incubators at the 1896 Berlin exposition and Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, then built infant exhibits in Omaha, Buffalo, Coney Island and Atlantic City, funding care worth over 500 dollars a day per baby in today's money with 25 cent admission and charging parents nothing.

His nurse and later wife Annabelle ran the wards with strict hygiene, and air was drawn from high outside through wool soaked in antiseptic. Live in wet nurses were barred from smoking, drinking and boardwalk hot dogs, and Madame Recht fed weak infants breast milk through the nose and slid her ring up their arms for the crowds. Couney's own daughter Hildegard, born six weeks early at three pounds, survived in his incubators. Against a eugenics era that told hospitals to let premature babies die, he partnered with Dr. Julius Hess at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, and a 1934 reunion of healthy babies helped push Chicago to adopt premature infant care policies.

• Tarnier's water jacketed incubator with a bimetallic strip acting as a thermostat
• The 1911 Coney Island fire, when staff evacuated every baby without injury
• Copycat exhibits that cut corners and tarnished all incubator shows
• A eugenics era film with the tagline kill defectives, save the nation
• Hospitals refusing his donated incubators, and an estimated 6,500 infants saved by his death in 1950