When preemies were a carnival sideshow

Before incubators won a place in U.S. hospital maternity wards, a renegade doctor had to lead a decadeslong crusade, making a sideshow display of preemies in the devices.

“The whole thing is just amazing to me,” said Beth Allen. She was one of those babies, a twin born prematurely in 1941 whose sister didn't survive. “The older I get, the more appreciative I am of the opportunity that I was given to be here to talk to you,” she told the Associated Press.

Allen, now of Hackensack, N.J., was among thousands of premature babies whose lives were saved in the early 20th century by Dr. Martin Couney, an incubator pioneer who promoted the technology by showing it off in carnival midways alongside freak shows and fan dancers.

Couney invited desperate parents to bring him their preemies, and he paid for their care with money raised from the 25-cent admission fee.

Allen said her mother initially rejected putting her on display, but her father persuaded Couney to talk to his wife, who acquiesced.

The German-trained doctor was well-known in the early 1900s for his work in keeping premature babies alive. The incubator was first seen in 1896 at the Berlin Exposition, and for the first time in the U.S. at expositions in Omaha, Neb., in 1898, and Buffalo, N.Y., in 1901.

But American hospitals were slow to accept incubators for a variety of reasons. A 2000 article in the Journal of Perinatology cited the belief among early 1900s infant-care experts that premature babies were weaklings who, if they survived, were likely to pass on that trait.

Couney opened his first exhibit with live babies at Coney Island's Luna Park in 1903. In the 1930s, he took his incubator babies to the world's fairs in New York and Chicago, where the display was on the midway next to the show of burlesque fan dancer Sally Rand. He ended the sideshows in 1943.

“We think this is a spectacle. We could never do this today,” said Dr. Richard Schanler, head of neonatal services at Cohen Children's Medical Center of New York. “But at the time, he was a leader. And I think we owe a lot of the very basic principles of neonatology to this gentleman.”