by Dawn Raffel
Martin loved to cook. He could make a feast, he said, from nothing—a soup bone. But in his midway kitchen they had plenty more than bones. His palate was discerning: He knew one fancy mustard from the next. These midwestern eaters, raised the way Maye had been, on pork chops and corn, might find themselves developing a hankering for gourmet delectations.
Martin would continue to add to his credentials.
Julius and Clara Hess were often at their table, along with Herman Bundesen, as well as Morris Fishbein, the editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association. Morris liked to bring along his daughter Barbara. That young lady would never forget les escargots.
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For today’s radio program, Martin was going to play it graciously modest. Fluent in French and German, exuberant in English, he could be jolly Uncle Martin, or courtly, or worldly, as needed. Reporters and tablemates swallowed his personal story, which he continued to perfect. Born in France or Germany (depending on who was asking). Often enough, he said Alsace. Matriculated in Berlin and Leipzig, two notably scientific cities. From there, he went to Paris to apprentice with a world-renowned doctor, Pierre-Constant Budin. Yes, his medically educated tablemates had heard of that name.
In 1896, he said, Budin sent his handpicked, German-speaking protégé (that would be himself) to the Great Industrial Exposition of Berlin with the mission of showing a new invention. Budin had developed infant incubators and was using them with great success at Paris Maternité. Young Martin had a vision: Rather than display the incubators vacant, he would demonstrate with living, breathing preemies, borrowed from a German charity ward. He called the exhibit Kinderbrutanstalt—“child hatchery”—and before it even opened, it had inspired drinking hall songs. The show itself, he would later say, outdrew the Congo Village and the Tyrolean yodelers.
Enter a British impresario named Samuel Schenkein. This dandy showbiz genius, having seen the child hatchery, invited Martin to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, to be held in London the following year. Budin gave his blessing, and the show was another smash.
On to another continent. In 1898, Martin made the transatlantic crossing for the world’s fair in Omaha, Nebraska. There his story swerved (as if it weren’t already strange enough). What motivated him to leave Europe for good? Once you’ve seen Omaha, you can never go back to Paris? No one really asked. Assume opportunity. Americans always did. After a quick trip back for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, he bid Paris Maternité adieu, booked passage to the New World, and never looked back. He also never practiced in a hospital again.
Earl’s Court, London.
Once in a while, Martin’s story changed. Occasionally, he said he’d invented the incubators himself. But for today, he would let the other doctors do the talking.
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Today and every day, Louise was in the nursery checking her charges. Powder and ointment, diapers and milk, vomit and waste; this was the stuff of her life. And worry. And faith. Every blessed day and all through the night. Was anyone sick? Who was losing ounces? Spitting up? Turning blue? Whose color was ever so slightly off?
One look and she knew, quicker than Martin, quicker than any duckling physician who came to assist him. She and Maye could nourish a child too weak to suckle. No one was better than she at feeding a child through the nose, one tiny drop of breast milk from a wet nurse at a time—hours, days, years of this. She had known Martin longer than Maye had. She had left Paris for him, for this, her American life, holding an infant, fragile in her arms, the ebb and flow of the breath, the whisper-thin skin, the body almost as weightless as the soul itself.
All the hot summers of sideshows and barkers, sharing a home with Martin and Maye; and Maye’s widowed mother, until she died; and Martin’s cousin Isador; and dear baby Hildegarde, who called her Aunt Louise. Hildegarde was grown now, a nurse like her mother; she was running the show in Atlantic City while her parents were away.
Hildegarde Couney, holding a preemie, atop an Atlantic City float.
Some days a child was lost—out of sight of the crowd, in the back—the body fevered, undeveloped, no breath in the lungs. At least that little person had been given a chance. So many, Louise knew, would never receive even that. To make the point, you entertained the audience. She gave them “Madame.” And she was good at it too.
Martin liked to call it “propaganda for preemies.” Whatever it took, she would do.
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Not two months back, Martin had lost what might have been the chance of a lifetime to make propaganda. On May 28, a woman in rural Ontario gave birth: one, two, three, four, five. Premature, and how could they not be? Never had anyone heard of five surviving. Triplets were at a tremendous risk—rarely did all three live. Twins were endangered. What could be done about five? William Randolph Hearst had a genius idea: Send the famous Martin Couney!
Martin was a man who lived for yes. For once, he said no. And in a minute he’d regret it. Yvonne, Annette, Émilie, Cécile, and Marie—the Dionne quintuplets—were now the most famous children on earth. But how could he have known? Having never laid eyes on these girls, he could only surmise that some of them would die. And what if all of them did? The last thing he needed was a public disaster.
No one could fault him for demurring on the grounds that he was already committed to the babies in Chicago. And no one had to guess about what might have been his deeper reluctance—the secret that might leak and put an end to his career.
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Today brought another, possibly more important chance of a lifetime. Eleven o’clock in the morning, the mothers began to appear. They came from every corner of Chicagoland, glimmering with sweat, adjusting their loveliest summer frocks, walking in newly polished shoes, while their twins and singles mewled and hollered and spit up and cried like any other toddlers under the blazing sun. Here were Martin and Maye, resplendent and eager to greet them. Here came Miss May Winter, from the class of ’01. And here was the always impeccable Julius Hess, and Herman Bundesen, and with them Morris Fishbein. A curious crowd gathered, quite possibly oblivious to the news that halfway around the world, the Nazis were staging a coup in Austria.
At 12:45 p.m. on July 25, 1934, the CBS radio host intoned, “We bring you the world’s first Homecoming from the Incubator Station at the Century of Progress in Chicago.” He opened by introducing Dr. Martin Couney, who stated, briefly and simply, that at least 85 percent of the babies currently under his care were going to survive. Next, Mrs. Mollie Greenfield expressed her gratitude on behalf of all the mothers of the class of ’33. Then the announcer handed the microphone to the city’s health commissioner.
“All the world loves a baby,” Herman Bundesen began.
THE OBIT THAT WOULDN’T DIE
New York City, 1950
On a Thursday morning in March, an ambitious young doctor was reading The New York Times when something caught his eye. Within the decade, William Silverman would be regarded as one of the leading pediatricians in America. He would become director of neonatal intensive care at Babies Hospital of Columbia-Presbyterian in New York, and he would gain a reputation for his insistence on evidence-based medicine—as in, prove it before you use it.
William Silverman came of age in an era when doctors all too often followed their hunches down the path of disaster. In prosperous, postwar, sunny-side-up, baby-booming America, the infant incubator (with its plastic dome modeled on the B-29 bomber) was standard equipment in hospitals. This was the good news. The bad news was the widespread use of treatments that hadn’t been clinically tested. One theory held that since two- and three-pound humans can easily die from vomiting and diarrhea, it would be wiser not to feed them at all for the first few days. It worked! No more unwanted effluvia! Unfortunately, the patients died of starvation. Mortality rates sho
t up, and infants who survived had a higher risk of brain damage. Add “starve a baby” to the scrap heap of abandoned medical practices, along with, say, draining the blood out of someone who’s sick.
Another disastrous theory had to do with oxygen. If oxygen helped preemies breathe, the thinking went, then more of it ought to be better. As a result, a generation of infants—among them Stevie Wonder—was going blind because of a mysterious condition called retrolental fibroplasia. Later in the 1950s, William Silverman would be among the doctors to solve the puzzle.
Everyone needs a hobby, and Dr. Silverman’s was reading the New York Times obituary pages. No day was complete, he wryly told his colleagues, until he found out who’d died. On March 2, 1950, he picked up the paper and saw a most peculiar item, the subject of which was one Martin A. Couney, age eighty. This was a name no one would find in a medical textbook, yet according to the Times, the “incubator doctor” had treated preemies for half a century in American amusement parks. Coney Island! Atlantic City! World’s fairs! Outrageously, this fellow charged admission to look at his patients. And yet, he had some stellar European credentials. Very odd, indeed.
For a moment, William Silverman thought he had never heard of this man—and then, in the way that memory sometimes lifts the shade an inch—he realized that, yes, in fact, he had. Like millions of other people, he had visited Chicago’s Century of Progress in 1933 and, now that he thought of it, he had passed a sideshow advertising living babies in incubators. This was long before the problem of retrolental fibroplasia, before most hospitals even treated babies in incubators, let alone gave them oxygen. The show, he recalled, wasn’t in the Hall of Science but out on the throbbing midway. He was only fifteen at the time, but even then, it struck him as bizarre.
Had Martin Couney been alive on March 3, 1950, the meticulously scientific William Silverman might have rung him up. And had the latter been in passable health, he’d doubtlessly have extended an invitation to one of the city’s premier dining establishments. We can imagine the scene: The courtly European, well known to the maître d’, and the Cleveland-born doctor linger over rare gigot and no few glasses of wine. The room begins to empty for the evening. Martin Couney has cleaned his plate of every delectable morsel, soaking the juices into the final iota of chewy bread. He waxes passionate about saving the tiniest lives, invokes his French mentor—the great Pierre Budin!—and at the mention of his late wife, Maye, sheds a tear into a linen handkerchief, weepily sentimental in old age. He deftly deflects every penetrating question: Exactly which medical school did he attend? Where, precisely, was he born? Why the devil would anyone practice serious medicine on the midway? The wine is of a terrifically pricey vintage. When the second bottle is drained, Martin Couney produces his wallet without so much as a glance at the tab. His guest gets up from the table with more questions than he came with, but this has been a most congenial meeting, and perhaps is the beginning of a lasting friendship.
Alas, as noted in the Times, Martin Couney was dead. And now, if such a thought may be indulged, he seemed to be teasing from beyond the grave, playing a game of “Catch me if you can.” Who was this tantalizing man, who practiced something akin to vigilante medicine?
Martin Couney published nothing. Untethered by institutional affiliations, he moved in the ephemeral, flash-and-dazzle world of the midway, surrounded by flaneurs who left little but pixie dust behind. Records? It would be easier to track the incubator doctor’s gas and electric bills than to gather information about most of the babies who’d spent their earliest days in his care. As for the name Couney, that was neither French nor German. It could have been Irish—if it were spelled “Cooney.” Spelled with a u, it seemed to trace its roots to the beautiful land of make-believe.
William Silverman, one of the sharpest medical minds of the twentieth century, fully intended to get to the bottom of this. He had no inkling how many years he would spend, and that he would never fully uncover the start of this cockamamie story.
A SHOWMAN IS BORN
Prussia, 1869
In the Prussian town of Krotoschin, a woman cried out in labor. Her name was Fredericke Cohn, and she and her husband, Hermann, had left Alsace-Lorraine just a couple of years ahead of the Franco-Prussian War, as trouble rumbled across the border. Fredericke already had three children—Max, Alfons, Rebecca—born in quick succession. Now she was racked with the pains of labor again. Heaven knew this child would be her last. On December 29, 1869, as the decade ended and a bloody new one was about to begin, Fredericke gave birth to Michael.
Krotoschin (now Krotoszyn, in Poland) holds a contradiction: As with many places in Eastern Europe, its history seeps through its pores at the same time it is hollowed by erasure.
Whatever Hermann Cohn did for a living, the records are lost. But Fredericke’s people, the Levys, were doctors. One of their number was said to have ministered to Napoleon himself. Now she was raising her children in a city with little room for advancement. It was home to a well-known publisher, the Bar Loebel Monasch Press, a purveyor of prayer books and a celebrated edition of the Jerusalem Talmud. Among the Talmud’s more famous sayings: If one saves a single life, it is as if one has saved the world.
But most of the assimilated Jews here weren’t scholars. They were merchants and small-business men, and before the nineteenth century ended, they would begin to leave, with the population dropping up to and after the Great War.
Only seventeen Jewish people would be left in Krotoschin in September of 1939, when the Nazis rounded them up and deported them to the Łódź ghetto.
But in 1869, the Cohn family, now complete, could not have foreseen what the twentieth century would bring.
ET VOILÀ! THE ARTIFICIAL HEN
Paris, 1878
Nine winters had passed since Michael Cohn’s birth. Seven bitter winters since the Franco-Prussian War. The Germans had besieged and starved Paris, and brought her to her knees, and captured her sovereign, who would die in exile. But a renewal had finally come. And with it an Exposition Universelle, staged on the same proud acres as the exposition held before the war. Not since Napoleon III walked these grounds had Paris seen such grandeur. The purpose was to show the world that France was back, her glory undiminished.
Or almost. Alsace had been lost. Both the home the Cohns had left and the town to which they’d removed themselves now belonged to a newly unified Germany. Nevertheless, if the family hadn’t moved such a distance, they might have considered visiting this fair, with its clever inventions, its sumptuous gardens, its art. Michael might have delighted in viewing the head of the Statue of Liberty, before she sailed away to meet her body. By working on the armature, an engineer named Gustave Eiffel was building his reputation.
Yet for all the industry, invention, and determination on display, for all the symbolic rebirth, one critical national resource remained in short supply. The literal French birth rate, which had already been declining through the 1860s, was dropping like a guillotine.
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Dr. Étienne Tarnier was passing the afternoon at the zoo. Let the rest of the city go to the exposition and sweat it out with the tourists. As the head obstetrician at Paris Maternité, he had other considerations. This population plunge was deeply troubling. When war came again—as everyone knew it would; only a fool would think otherwise—how would there be enough soldiers for France to stand a chance? With too few children, how would the French economy survive? The beloved culture? Who needed enemies when France was poised to murder herself from within?
The edge of the blade was women having fewer children, working outside the home. Not much he could do about that. But the babies they bore were dying all too often. Already, Tarnier had developed axis-traction forceps, a new design that would help with stubborn heads. At fifty, he was making a dent in treating postpartum complications such as puerperal fever. But what about the infants born too soon, too small—the feebl
e ones, the “weaklings,” as they were called in the medical literature? Under 2,000 grams (4.4 pounds), maybe seven months’ gestation, they were almost certain to die.
The Jardin d’Acclimatation, the zoo in the Bois de Boulogne, offered plenty to contemplate that day. The place itself had risen from the dead. During the war, besieged Parisians, reduced to consuming any available flesh—equine, canine, feline, rodent—ate the zoo’s unfortunate inhabitants, sparing only the monkeys, who looked too unnervingly human. A pair of beloved elephants named Castor and Pollux appeared on the menu of a restaurant called Voisin, in the form of “braised elephant pudding,” proof that one might face starvation with panache.
Of late, the zoo had been restocked not only with animals but also with human beings. First, it was Africans and Eskimos, then Argentinian gauchos and “Lapps.” In the name of anthropological interest, visitors came to gawp, as if these others belonged to a different, inferior species.
Étienne Tarnier was having none of it.
He had come for chickens. Specifically, he wanted to inspect the new machines designed for hatching and fattening them. To watch a chicken peck its way out of its shell is nothing short of mesmerizing: A minute before it was only an orb, now it’s a feathered thing, like hope. As Tarnier sat and watched, he was struck by a revelation: If poultry could be nurtured in an incubator, why not premature humans?