Babies in Incubators Were Once a Sideshow

It’s a story that may be unfamiliar to a lot of people. Unless of course, you’re a fan of sideshows.

I’d like to introduce you to a new type of sideshow exhibit that might surprise you. it turned out for a time at the beginning of the 20th century, babies became stars of sideshows for a very weird reason.

One of the main characters of this story is Dr. Martin A. Cooney. He knew that incubators could play a powerful role in ensuring the health of premature babies. But he also knew that the medical establishment didn’t have much interest in pushing this new technology forward- the incubator was a very new idea at the time. There wasn’t a lot of money being put into research for this lifesaving technology. So he decided that he would hit the streets himself, and built a traveling exhibit that showed audience members, premature babies living in incubators.

But Cooney’s fascination with incubators didn’t just come as an overnight thing. He allegedly studied in Paris under a very well-respected researcher and, and physician named Pierre Budin who was confused as to why these devices hadn’t been adopted more widely. So he displayed some incubators in the Berlin World’s Fair in 1896.

And this is an idea that went through several iterations before Cooney had brought the act to the United States.

His baby child hatchery or infantorium was about one and a half meters high, they had steel walls, they had a framework, and a glass front so you could observe the children, and they used water boilers to feed warm water into pipes running underneath the babies and thermostats to maintain and regulate temperatures. These babies overall were safe in these things.

The reason the medical establishment did not immediately jump on the baby train here is that they had a long history of prejudice toward premature babies; it was expensive to care for them. And honestly, as horrible as this sounds, a lot of people thought it was pointless because babies born below a certain threshold of birth weight had high mortality. Physicians also thought this invention that came from watching chickens in a zoo was unscientific and they didn’t believe that it could save people’s lives. That’s where the guy mentioned earlier, Pierre, comes in. He started researching the technology in 1888. He kept running into roadblocks for funding. And that’s why in 1896 he decided to display these incubators at the World’s Fair.

So Cooney realizes these exhibits could save babies' lives, and that the public will pay to see this futuristic technology. Eventually, he and Budin realize that these exhibits are successful enough to make a potential lifesaver for these children.

Cooney was interested personally in this because he was the father of a child born prematurely. In Buffalo, New York 1901, he built this huge building just for the baby incubator exhibit. He got tons of press, which turned out to be even more important than getting a lot of people in the crowd. And that’s how it started in 1903. You could see the permanent Coney Island baby incubator exhibition at Luna Park and another one was also in Coney Island at dreamland. So nurses would tend to the babies the public would look on in amazement.

The weird thing is, this is still kind of like a sideshow.

There were theatrical elements to this that people were going to see. According to a book by Dawn Raffel, The Strange Case of Dr. Cooney, Cooney knew the score, he dressed infants on purpose in large clothing. He would have nurses slip a finger ring around the entire wrist of a premature child because this was visually appealing. People were watching it for fascination and a little bit of anxiety.

He would charge a couple of cents to get in and was raking in about $15100 a day. But here’s the thing, this was a permanent installation at Coney Island’s Luna Park. While he charged people to see it, he didn’t charge the parents of the babies to put them in there. So without him, and this sideshow, it’s likely that a lot of these babies wouldn’t have survived.

He made a lot of money and it went to the children. We know that in 1903, it costs $15 a day to care for each baby. That’s around $405 a day in these modern times. Cooney was able to cover all the costs through the entrance fees alone. But because he was operating in a sideshow setting, rather than the maternity ward of a hospital, people viewed him with suspicion. Some folks outright hated this guy, folks like the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. They accused him multiple times of exploiting the babies endangering their lives, putting them on display, but none of these complaints hurt the endeavor. By the 1930s, people were accepting Cooney as a medical pioneer.

If you happen to see the World's Fair, in Chicago in 1933, and 1934, It'd be tough to miss Connie's display; you would see this huge sign advertising his exhibition.

It was categorized by the Smithsonian article as the letters being so large that they could be read from across the entire fairground, which was massive. His booth was right next to one featuring the famous scandalous Sally Rand, who was known for her ostrich feather fan dance, and also balloon bubble dance at the Chicago World’s Fair.

The entire cost of the exhibit was around $75,000 back then, which is around $1.4 million today. And the price went up over time as it became more respected in the public eye. By the time it was in Chicago, the audience members paid 25 cents to see the exhibit, and they flocked there by the hundreds of 1000s. Eventually, this leads to Cooney having a homecoming celebration on July 25, 1934. It was for the babies who had graduated from the incubators at the Chicago World’s Fair that past summer. And this was broadcast live on local radio and across the fairgrounds so people were able to see the results of this incubation technology at work.

This was an era and it did come to an end. After decades of caring for these children, Cooney was credited with the development of neonatal care in hospitals. But the public got familiarized with it and lost that razzle-dazzle. By the early 1940s people just weren’t as interested in the novelty of baby incubators and hospitals were also starting to open their units dedicated to the care of premature children. And so in 1943 Cooney closes the show in Coney Island. He lives seven more years after he passes away at the age of 80.

There’s one thing Cooney wasn’t which was a doctor. He claimed that he studied medicine in Berlin and Leipzig but there was no evidence that he studied medicine at the University in either of those cities. In Germany, to be a physician, you have to write a thesis. The US National Library of Medicine has copies of all of the German records and has thus far been unable to locate a thesis written by Cooney.

He was also sketchy about the specifics of his personal life. He claimed he was born in 1888 but the problem with that is someone of that age would not have been old enough to be at university in Berlin and Leipzig before going on to do grad work in Paris. He claimed to be the inventor of an incubator, but there's no evidence that he registered a patent.

Martin Cooney saved some 7,000 American babies. Some of them are still alive but there’s a lot more information that I highly recommend you check out. Arguably, Cooney’s background and profession are sketchy but we can agree that those 7000 babies might have not survived if not for this gentleman.

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