The Forgotten Carnival Sideshow That Saved Countless Babies' Lives

If you were to visit New York’s Coney Island in the early 20th Century, you would have found no shortage wonderful amusements to occupy your time. You could swim in the ocean, enjoy an ice cream or a hot dog, or brave the death-defying mechanical rides of the island’s three giant amusement parks. If you were feeling more adventurous, you could take in such spectacles as a Boer War battle reenactment starring a thousand soldiers, a burning building being extinguished by firefighters, reenactments of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the 1889 Jonestown Flood, or sideshow attractions like Lilliputia, a village inhabited entirely by little people. But amid this “anything goes” carnival atmosphere, one attraction would have seemed rather out of place. For a 25-cent admission fee, you could enter a sterile room attended by white-gowned nurses, in which dozens of tiny premature babies, weighing only a pound or two, lay swaddled inside glass-doored incubators. This strange exhibit was among the most popular on the island, drawing thousands of visitors every day to witness this miracle of modern medicine. But this was not some crass parody or even an advertisement for New York City hospitals; incredibly, for nearly half the Twentieth Century the Incubator Exhibit at Coney Island was among the only dedicated neonatal care facilities in the United States, taking in thousands of desperate cases that no other hospital could care for. This strange combination of hospital ward and carnival sideshow was the life’s work of a mysterious German immigrant named Dr. Martin Couney, who for nearly fifty years defied the Medical Establishment and helped give thousands of premature infants a fighting chance at life.