SYMHC Classics: Dr. Couney's Baby Sideshow

This 2019 episode looks at Couney's incubator sideshows of premature babies. This is complicated; Couney made money from this, and his medical experience was questionable. But premature babies weren’t getting a lot of care otherwise. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:06Speaker 01

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• 0:34Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 1:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune into Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Workplace chaos, we've all been there. Deadlines are slipping, projects are piling up, and suddenly you realize the missing piece is the right person. That's when you say, this is a job for sponsored jobs. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, your job post gets a boost so you can connect with quality candidates faster. In fact, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs.

• 2:01Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 2:16Holly Frey?

  In our recent episode on Exum Clement Stafford, we mentioned her daughter describing herself as Asheville, North Carolina's first incubator baby. Well, we have a whole episode related to the development of incubators and their use in caring for premature babies. It's about when babies in incubators were used as sideshow attractions at theme parks and expositions.

• 2:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  This came out on November 6, 2019. We had just come back from a tour and I was a little bit under the weather. I thought about not rerunning it for that reason, but really, it's the most obvious, just for the first couple of minutes of the episode. So, enjoy.

• 2:57Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 3:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 3:11Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 3:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  We are just back from our Denver and Chicago leg of our tour, and I have a little post-tour vocal uncertainty.

• 3:23Holly Frey?

  Yeah, I think we're both in Torch Song territory. Mine alternately sounds fine and then like garbage, so brace.

• 3:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, so if you've never heard our show before, this is maybe not what we typically sound like all of the time. Anyway, we have gotten so, so many requests for today's topic, including one that came in from our listener, Alyssa. While I was writing the episode, that never happens. Normally, when people say, have you ever thought about doing an episode on whatever, fill in the blank, like 99% of the time, the answer is, I don't know, maybe. Like, there's so much stuff to think about. But this was a case where she said, have you ever thought of doing this? And I was like, I'm working on it right now. So, way back when. We heard from Angela, Dan, Kristen, and Harrison, all requesting this topic.

• 4:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then it briefly came up in our past episode on the Fort Shaw Indian School Girls Basketball Team. By total coincidence, after we recorded that episode, but before it came out, the other podcast, Sawbones, put out an episode on the topic. So then we were just flooded with message about folks saying, hey, Sawbones just did this. I lost track of everyone requesting it. And anyway, the point is, today, we are talking about Martin Cooney and his incubator sideshows, which came complete with premature babies in them. I've heard people pronounce his names, his name, a couple of different ways. I've heard some people say, uh, County, and I've heard some people say Cooney, but Cooney seems to be the more common. From a medical ethics standpoint, this is complicated.

• 4:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Cooney was turning premature babies and their care into a sideshow attraction, and for a while, he was also making a lot of money off of that. And there are a lot of question marks around his background and the experience that he had and whether he was qualified to be doing this at all. But at the same time, premature babies really were not getting a lot of care otherwise. And the general sense among the mainstream medical community was that there was really nothing to be done for them. So he was definitely saving babies' lives. Also, some question marks around what he was doing.

• 5:28Holly Frey?

  Today, when people use the phrase premature baby, they typically mean a baby who was born before 37 weeks gestation. But during the time that we're talking about today, that term was a lot more nebulous. It did include babies who had been born before 37 weeks, but it also included babies who had a low birth weight for some other reason, along with babies who maybe had some sort of illness, disability, or developmental issue.

• 5:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  Regardless of the cause, these babies were often lumped together and described as weaklings. And for the most part, doctors and hospitals in the 19th century and Europe and North America just didn't provide them any kind of specialized care. Parents were instructed to keep them warm and to hope or pray for the best, but that was just about it. And then underlying this was an attitude that these babies, who were not very strong at their birth, would just grow up to be adults who also weren't very strong if they survived. So there was this idea that maybe it was better to just let nature take its course.

• 6:27Holly Frey?

  Of course, this is an ableist mindset, and it sounds really callous today. But at the time, infant mortality in general was quite high, even among babies who were born at full term and seemed initially to be healthy. And as we talked about in our previous episode on Virginia Apgar, well into the 20th century, there was a lot more medical focus on the person giving birth than on the newborn baby. In the 19th century, the death of a baby was a tragedy, but it was almost an expected tragedy, especially among premature babies.

• 7:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  The development that started to turn this perception around was the incubator. Historically, people have known that babies need to be kept warm, but not too hot. This is especially true for preterm infants who have less body fat and just aren't able to regulate their own body temperature as well. People have used things like heated rocks, or bricks, or water bottles, blankets, candles, and their own body heat to try to keep babies warm.

• 7:27Holly Frey?

  And there have also been cultures that recognized that premature babies in particular needed to be kept consistently warm. As Tracy was working on this, she found an article from back in the 1940s. So the language there was really outdated, but it described native people in Siberia wrapping babies in the skin of a seabird with the feathers turned inward, and then keeping this sort of pouch that they had created suspended over a very small flame. And that article also discussed indigenous people in Mozambique keeping preterm babies wrapped up and placed in a large pot that was warmed up in the sun. Both of these techniques were essentially working as incubators.

• 8:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  But the incubator, as we think of it today, was first developed in France in the 19th century by obstetrician Stephane Tarnier. At the time, France as a nation was very concerned about its birth rate, which was a lot lower than some of its neighbors. This was leading to very practical worries about whether France would have enough soldiers and laborers in the future. So people were looking for ways not just to increase the birth rate, but also to protect the lives of the babies that were already being born.

• 8:37Holly Frey?

  Tarnier got the idea after seeing incubators being used to hatch eggs at a zoo. His first incubator was not very sophisticated. It was basically a hot water bottle under a wooden chamber with a glass top, but it got the job done. In 1881, he tested it out in a Paris maternity ward, focusing on babies who weighed less than 2,000 grams. That's a little under four and a half pounds at birth. He reported that being kept in the incubator cut their mortality rate in half.

• 9:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although this test went really well, Tarnier's invention wasn't really able to be put into widespread use. Most babies in France were being born at home, not in the hospital. So hospitals set up premature baby wards to receive these babies after their parents brought them in, but most of the time, at least a day or two passed between the birth and the arrival at the hospital. So by the time they were admitted, these babies had been just too cold for too long. Sometimes they had also contracted some kind of illness, and so their mortality rate continued to be quite high.

• 9:40Holly Frey?

  In 1889, physician Alexandre Lyon patented an improved version of the incubator. Like Tarnier's incubator, it heated a chamber from below, but it also had a ventilation system that drew fresh air into the incubator and a thermostat to regulate the temperature.

• 9:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  These devices were expensive, and it was also expensive for a hospital to employ a 24-hour medical staff to care for the babies that needed them. This was especially true since most people weren't giving birth in hospitals. So for the most part, hospitals weren't adding premature infant care to existing labor and delivery wards that were already fully staffed. They were having to start from scratch. It could be weeks or months before these babies were ready to go home, so wards for premature infants also needed to employ wet nurses to keep them fed.

• 10:28Holly Frey?

  So to make this level of care affordable, Lyon established a number of premature infant charities in France's major cities. And while those were in operation, they treated as many as 8,000 infants, with roughly 7,500 of them surviving. These facilities were funded by charitable contributions by the cities where they were operating and by the admission fees that people paid to come and look at these babies.

• 10:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  These incubators soon spread outside of France, as did the idea of putting the incubators and the babies inside them on display. On May 1st, 1896, the Kinder Rudenstall, or Child Hatchery, opened at the Berlin Industrial Exposition. This included six incubators that were open for public view, along with housing for the medical staff and the wet nurses who were working there.

• 11:18Holly Frey?

  Later on, Martin Cooney said that the Child Hatchery in Berlin was where he got his start in working with incubators and premature babies. He said that he was from Alsace-Lorraine, France, and had studied medicine at University of Leipzig before continuing his education under the tutelage of French pediatrician Pierre Boudin. Boudin was one of the leading authorities on the care of premature infants. He even went on to write the first major textbook on the subject, which was titled "Nursing: The Feeding and Hygiene of Premature and Full-Term Infants."

• 11:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  So according to Cooney, he went to Berlin on Boudin's instruction to run the Child Hatchery at the Berlin Industrial Exposition. Cooney said that it had been his idea to put these babies in the incubators rather than just showcasing empty incubators as an example of a new technology. He also said he worked with Empress Augusta Victoria to get approval for premature babies from Berlin's hospitals to be cared for in this exhibit.

• 12:17Holly Frey?

  But none of that seems to actually be true. And we are gonna get to more about Cooney and all of that after we first pause for a little sponsor break.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time, and you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at nsl.sport.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 13:04Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 13:24Speaker 03

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• 13:32Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 13:39Speaker 04

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• 13:44Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 13:56Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Some life decisions are hard, but thanks to ADT Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:08Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  to help solve hiring challenges and find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 16:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  According to Martin Cooney's immigration documents, he was born in Crotoshon on December 30th, 1869. Today, that's Crotoshon, Poland, but at the time, it was in Prussia. Cooney's name at birth was Michael Cohen. He and his family were Jewish, as was about a third of the population of the town where they were living. From there, his upbringing and background get really unclear. The backstory that he told people about when and where he was born was all over the place. He is listed on the manifest of a ship that came to the US in 1888, when he was 19. But by 1897, he was in London, having partnered with entrepreneur Samuel Shankind to create an incubator exhibition for the Victorian era exhibition.

• 17:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although Cooney claimed that he had studied medicine in Leipzig, which logically would have happened between 1888 and 1897, There's no evidence that he studied at the University of Leipzig or at any other university in Europe, or that he continued his studies with Pierre Bouddin.

• 17:27Holly Frey?

  There's also no evidence that Cuny had anything to do with the child hatchery in Berlin, although it seems as though he and Schenckin licensed that endeavor from Alexandre Lyon when they started working on a similar attraction at the Victorian era exhibition.

• 17:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  When Cuny and Schenckin launched the Victorian era exhibition incubator display, incubators had been used in France and other parts of the Western European continent for years, but they were still pretty new in England. Attitudes about parenting were a little different. Parents were just not as receptive to the idea. When Cuny and Schenckin had trouble convincing parents to place their babies in the exhibition, they brought newborns across the Channel from France under the care of Nurse Louise Recht, who spent a lot of her career working with Cuny's exhibits.

• 18:14Holly Frey?

  At least 200,000 people visited the incubators at the Victorian era exhibition. It got a favorable write-up in The Lancet, although The Lancet's coverage of these types of exhibitions wasn't always positive. Cuny and Schenckin also wrote a letter to The Lancet in 1897, warning of the dangers of competing shows that were not affiliated with them and had no medical staff. Cuny's name on this particular letter is printed as Martin Coney, C-O-N-E-Y.

• 18:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  And Martin Coney seems to have evolved into Martin Cooney by the time Cuny started an incubator exhibition at the Trans Mississippi and International Exhibition, also known as the Omaha World's Fair. That was in 1898, although at that point, he hadn't changed his name legally yet.

• 19:00Holly Frey?

  While in Omaha, Cuny was approached by the Krug Cabinet Beer Company about supplying beer for the exhibit's wet nurses. Folks have long believed that beer can help improve milk supply, something that seems to be connected to one of the polysaccharides in the barley rather than to the alcohol content. The Omaha Daily Bee published a quote by Dr. Martin Cooney that, quote, "We take pleasure in stating we have used Krug Cabinet bottled beer consistently for milk-producing qualities. We can cheerfully recommend it to all nursing mothers."

• 19:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  On November 2nd, 1898, while still in Omaha, Cooney was naturalized as a U.S. citizen. At that time, he testified that he'd been living in Nebraska continually for the previous 10 years, and that was clearly not true, since at minimum, he had been in London for the Victorian exhibition.

• 19:50Holly Frey?

  Cooney's next major exhibition was the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, which had 18 incubators. By that point, at least one hospital was also trying to use incubators for premature infant care. That was Chicago Lying In Hospital, where an incubator station was opened in 1900 by Joseph B. De Lee. This station had some of the same struggles as the first French hospitals using incubators did back in the 1880s. They were expensive to buy, run, and staff, and most of the babies who needed them were being born at home. By contrast, the attraction at the expo went very well, although the exposition itself was marred by the assassination of President McKinley.

• 20:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1903, Cooney started the baby exhibit that he's most famous for. It was his first permanent exhibition at Luna Park on Coney Island. This was permanent in that he continued to run it for decades. But the park itself was seasonal, so during the winter months, any babies who were still there were either sent home or to hospitals along with their incubators, and any incubators not in use were put into storage.

• 20:56Holly Frey?

  The Luna Park exhibition was similar to all of Cooney's previous exhibitions. It had space for the incubators themselves, which people could view through a window after buying a ticket. The space had housing for the medical staff and the wet nurses. The staff included Dr. Solomon Fischel and nurses Louise Recht and Annabelle Segner.

• 21:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  But unlike earlier exhibits, this one also had an exam room that was also viewable through a window. So in addition to seeing the babies and their incubators, the audience would also see there's some of their medical examinations and other care. Their parents weren't charged anything for the babies' care and no premature baby was turned away. The incubator displays had always had kind of an educational component, explaining what the incubators were and how they worked and why the babies needed them. And this continued at Luna Park as well.

• 21:44Holly Frey?

  For the most part, the care that the babies were getting was pretty basic. Even when Pierre Boudin's textbook on premature infant care was published in 1901, most of its guidelines boiled down to keeping the baby warm and fed and preventing infections. Breast milk was the ideal food, which is why there were wet nurses on staff. If breast milk was not available for some reason, sterilized cow's milk could be used as a substitute. For babies who were too weak to suckle, the nurses used droppers or tubes into the stomach or through the nose.

• 22:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  At the same time, this was definitely a carnival attraction. It was located on a boardwalk in an amusement park. Although Cooney had strict rules for cleanliness and hygiene and the diets of the wet nurses, the surrounding area was noisy and dirty. Sometimes the exhibits around the babies were a little racy. The staff also included barkers, who tried to draw in an audience from outside, and people who sold tickets for 25 cents apiece.

• 22:43Holly Frey?

  And there was definitely some theatricality involved in the display itself. The babies were often dressed in clothes that were too big for them, with an oversized bow around their middle, and that made them look even smaller than they already were. Nurse Recht was fond of putting a diamond ring from her index finger around a baby's wrist, where it would dangle like a bracelet.

• 23:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Even though Cooney was providing lifesaving care to these premature infants, and even though everyone seems to have taken as fact that he really was a medical doctor, the Luna Park exhibit drew a lot of criticism. On August 17, 1903, an article in the New York Times accused Cooney of running a baby farm. John D. Lindsay, who was president of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, became an outspoken critic of Cooney and of baby sideshows.

• 23:33Holly Frey?

  Eventually, the matter went to court, and Cooney testified that he had saved 50 of the 52 babies he was brought in Buffalo, and so far, 18 of the 19 babies brought to him in New York. The Luna Park sideshow was allowed to continue.

• 23:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  On August 31, 1903, Michael Cohen legally changed his name to Martin Arthur Cooney. A little less than a month later, on September 26, he married Nurse Annabelle Segner, who continued to work with him at the baby exhibit.

• 24:01Holly Frey?

  In 1904, the Luna Park nursery opened for the season, and another location, virtually identical, opened at Dreamland Amusement Park, which was also on Coney Island. A third amusement park location later opened in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

• 24:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Throughout all of this, other people were continuing to use incubators with living babies as exhibits and sideshows and fairs and expositions people who didn't have anything to do with Martin Cooney. Cooney wrote about these as inferior imitations of his own idea, even though it really seems like he lifted this idea from Alexandre Lyon.

• 24:38Holly Frey?

  Some of these other exhibits ran without incident, but in 1904, disaster struck at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also called the St. Louis World's Fair. This was the one that we talked about in our previous episode on the Fort Shaw Indian School Girls Basketball Team. There was an outbreak of diarrhea in the exhibit, and the mortality rate at the exhibit approached 50%. A doctor was brought in to take charge, and Cooney was careful to stress that he had not had anything to do with that exhibit.

• 25:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although Cooney continued to arrange and run baby incubator attractions and expositions, the amusement park locations were really a big part of the rest of his career. And we'll get into more of that after another quick sponsor break.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time, and you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at nsl.sport.

• 25:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  For any small business owner, there's a moment when you realize the next hire could be the difference between staying busy and actually growing. The challenge is finding the right person without wasting time sorting through candidates who aren't the right fit. That's where Indeed Sponsored Jobs comes in. When workplace chaos hits and you need someone who can step in and make a difference, this is a job for Sponsored Jobs. It helps put your job in front of candidates who match the criteria that matter most to you, whether that's skills, experience, certifications, or location. And you're certainly not alone in using Indeed. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. That's millions of businesses turning to Indeed

• 26:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  to help solve hiring challenges and find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 27:07Speaker 05

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• 27:35Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

• 28:17Holly Frey?

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• 28:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the years after Martin Cooney arranged his first incubator attraction, he started holding periodic reunions, which would bring together babies and young children who had spent their early months in one of his incubators, now, of course, thriving and healthy. The large majority of premature infants that he cared for went on to grow and thrive.

• 29:03Holly Frey?

  At the same time, his whole career was full of ups and downs. For example, in 1905, the Infant Incubator Company was established with Cooney's colleagues, Dr. Solomon Fischel and Samuel Schenkine, as co-directors. That same year, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children tried to lobby for legislation that would make the exhibition of babies in incubators a misdemeanor.

• 29:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  On January 29th, 1907, Cooney's wife Annabelle gave birth to a daughter about six weeks early. Since it was January, the amusement parks were closed for the season, so Cooney got somebody to retrieve one of the exhibit incubators from storage. This daughter, Hildegard Frances, survived her infancy and went on to become a nurse working in her father's exhibits. She was also dogged by rumors that she wasn't actually Martin and Annabelle's child, but was a premature baby that somebody else had abandoned.

• 29:57Holly Frey?

  On May 27th, 1911, a fire broke out at Dreamland Amusement Park. As always, there were staff members on duty at the incubator exhibition, which was successfully evacuated. But The New York Times published an incorrect report saying that all of the babies had been killed. John D. Lindsay used this as fodder to renew his criticisms of the sideshows, although they did continue to operate.

• 30:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1914, Cooney established an incubator display at White City Amusement Park in Chicago, and there he met Dr. Julius Hess. Hess would go on to establish the first dedicated intensive care unit for premature infants in the United States. Hess didn't really approve of the theatricality that was involved with Cooney's exhibits, but he really regarded Cooney as a friend and a colleague. When Hess published his textbook, Premature and Condentally Disease Infants, he had Cooney review it beforehand and acknowledged his contributions when it was published. Hess also dedicated another book to Cooney in 1928.

• 30:58Holly Frey?

  Together, Hess and Cooney planned a state-of-the-art incubator facility for the Chicago Century of Progress in 1933. While Cooney's earlier incubator exhibits had included some education, this was more like a functioning research institute, with the staff specifically studying the care the babies were receiving and its effects and outcomes. Hess and Cooney's medical teams were both involved, so each team learned from the other. At about the same time, more hospitals were starting to establish dedicated facilities for preterm infant care. So this work, being done at the Century of Progress, was contributing to a growing medical field.

• 31:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  The next year, in 1934, William Randolph Hearst approached Cooney with a request to travel to Canada, where quintuplets had been born in Ontario. These five babies came to be known as the Dion Quints, and Cooney declined to get involved with their care. The reason that he gave publicly was that his existing patients needed him. He just didn't have time with his other work. But it was also because he didn't think these babies were likely to survive. In his experience, in cases of multiple births, at most, only one baby survived.

• 32:09Holly Frey?

  All five of the Dion Quintuplets did survive their infancy, and we have gotten a lot of requests to talk about them on the podcast. It's kind of like the never-ending request line. But two of them are still living, and we don't generally do biographies of living persons. And they have also said pretty clearly that they just want their privacy. And a big part of their story is their privacy being taken away from them from their infancy and childhoods. That is why we are not doing an episode on the Dion Quintuplets. So, yes, it is fascinating, and we understand the curiosity, but we're respecting their privacy.

• 32:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, they've pretty clearly said they would just like to be left alone. In the late 1930s, things were pretty difficult for Cooney. His wife, Annabel, died. He was also aware of events in Germany as Hitler came to power, and he knew that his Jewish friends and family in Europe were at great risk. During the late 1930s, he arranged for about 15 people to leave Europe, paying their way and handling their paperwork.

• 33:08Holly Frey?

  Then, Cooney tried to arrange another incubator sideshow at the New York World's Fair in 1939. But by this point, the novelty of incubators had started to wear off. The exhibit just didn't draw the kinds of crowds that previous efforts had, and for the first time, Cooney lost money. The show was renewed for a second season, with Cooney hoping that he could make up for the earlier loss, but the opposite happened. The whole thing was financially disastrous.

• 33:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  It was not going well at this point for the more permanent locations either, and the two remaining amusement park attractions, which were at Luna Park and Atlantic City, both closed in 1943. At that point, Cooney retired. Also, more and more premature care wards were opening around the United States by this point. It was something that paused a little during World War II, but then resumed afterward.

• 33:57Holly Frey?

  Cooney died on March 1, 1950. He had become known at that point as the incubator doctor. And it's estimated that during his career, his exhibitions cared for at least 8,000 babies and saved the lives of at least 6,500 of them. But when talking about it to the media, he always stressed that he shouldn't get all the credit, that the doctors, nurses, and wet nurses on staff were critical to the work.

• 34:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  Cooney's legacy is really complicated. There are just so many holes and some outright falsehoods in the backstory that he told people about himself. And we really have no idea what his credentials were when he started his first exhibit. There's just no documentation that he had the medical degree that he said he had. Although, we could logically conclude that he changed his name to try to avoid antisemitism, we don't actually know what motivated him to do it, or why he was just so cagey and inconsistent about what his background was.

• 34:55Holly Frey?

  But he definitely dedicated most of his adult life to taking care of babies that doctors didn't think could or should be helped. And thanks to his work, the public perception of premature babies also started to shift away from this idea of hopeless weaklings who might be better off if they were allowed to die, to fighters who could thrive if they just had the right kind of care.

• 35:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Some writers have framed Cooney's work as an opposition to the eugenics movement. And while it's true that the eugenics movement approved of the idea of allowing the so-called weak to, quote, "die out," Cooney also reinforced some of that same mindset with how he talked about these babies. He stressed that they were going to grow up, quote, "healthy and normal and not to be weaklings." He implied that if they were going to grow up to be ill or disabled, he wouldn't be doing what he was doing.

• 35:47Holly Frey?

  There are also arguments about whether Cooney's use of incubators as a sideshow attraction delayed their mainstream medical acceptance. That one's a little harder to pin down. On the one hand, as Cooney and his staff were working with these children, they were learning and developing new skills and getting better at it over time and influencing the work of some of the United States' earliest neonatologists. But it is also entirely possible that doctors just didn't want to be associated with something that was so closely connected to sideshows and amusement parks and that it made the whole technology seem a little bit suspicious.

• 36:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  And of course, there have been huge advances in premature baby care since Cooney's death. They are largely outside the scope of this podcast, but especially for babies born very early. It's no longer a matter of just trying to keep them warm and fed and preventing illnesses. There are a lot of other medical interventions that can take place, and that has led to a whole other ethical debate about when to resuscitate premature babies and what level of care and intervention that they should receive. That's Martin Cooney and his baby sideshows, which are fascinating and also kind of complicated topics.

• 36:56Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 37:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 37:54Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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