The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

by Dawn Raffel

  To build a worthy incubator, you didn’t want a professor or a physician. You wanted an engineer. As for Odile Martin from the Paris zoo, he was clearly out of his depth. In the superior system that he, Alexandre Lion, had devised—brilliant, if he said so himself—warm air circulated via a spiral water pipe, heated by a reliable boiler. The thermometer he affixed to the side recorded a constant, ideal temperature. Problem solved. Yet here was another way his invention was better: ventilation. A fan blew fresh air into and out of the incubator, with a pipe that led outside, and a disinfecting filter. His machine was also pretty, with a generous glass window affording an enjoyable view of the baby lying inside. For feedings, the weaklings were taken to a “dining room” and fed by breast, or in the case of those too feeble to suckle from a wet nurse, by tiny drops of breast milk, fed through the nose with a funneled spoon.

  With all of this, who needed a hospital? Those were nasty places anyway, hotbeds of infection. In 1891, Lion opened a show in his hometown, Nice. The babies were charity cases, and given the urgent nationalistic need to save them, the municipal government gave him funding. So did the wealthy society ladies who liked to come and look. The public was invited, free of charge. Why not?

  Two years in, another genius initiative: host a reunion to prove that his patients—of all races—had thrived. A year after that, he reported saving 137 out of 185 babies, about 74 percent. The only ones he lost, he said, weighed less than two pounds or had mothers who’d waited too long to deliver them into his care.

  A doctor was almost superfluous. Parents could buy this and use it at home. Nor did Lion give much credit to his nurses, implying that the primary prerequisite was youth: They had to be capable of staying up all night. He hired them for six-month stints, replaceable pieces of his scheme.

  From Nice, he expanded to Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille, and Paris, where, without government help, he found himself required to charge a modest admission. At the Infant Incubator Charity at No. 26, Boulevard Poissonière, Parisians paid fifty centimes to see babies described by a reporter as “just big enough to put in your pocket.” That same reporter stated that “like the bearded lady at the circus,” the show was worth the price.

  No. 26, Boulevard Poissonière, Paris.

  * * *

  —

  It seemed as if the only person not convinced was Dr. Pierre Budin, the man who’d succeeded in succeeding Étienne Tarnier as the head of obstetrics at Paris Maternité. Budin and Lion moved in different circles, yet the pediatrician decided to give the new machine a try. But the gas supply to the hospital was still so hit-or-miss that even with the much-improved boiler, it was hopeless. Back to hot-water bottles.

  In fact, back to the mother. At Maternité, the rudimentary couveuse was placed next to the mother’s bed to encourage maternal bonding. Breast, breast, breast. In this, Budin was relentless. A leading cause of infant death was diarrhea, and he believed cow’s milk was a culprit. He set up clinics to teach new mothers about nutrition and hygiene. He also used gavage, Tarnier’s system in which infants too weak to suckle were fed through a tube, not with a spoon like Lion’s.

  Budin would be dead before the babies he’d painstakingly saved would be summoned to the battlefields of World War I, some of them blown to bits before they were out of adolescence.

  * * *

  —

  Alexandre Lion was strategic. He secured an invitation to the Industrial Exposition, knowing that recognition in Berlin would count for more than whatever he did in France. Before the show’s opening in Treptower Park, he applied for a German Patentschrift and licensed the instrument maker Paul Altmann to manufacture his invention. Altmann had as solid a reputation as anyone could wish for. His clients included Robert Koch, the physician who’d discovered the bacterium that causes tuberculosis.

  On every possible level, the show in Berlin succeeded. The “child hatchery” wowed the crowds, but the official name was the Children’s Incubation Institute, and prominent doctors, including the highly regarded public health advocate Rudolf Virchow, gave it their blessing. The Germans wanted to make the exhibition permanent.

  Alexandre Lion wanted to go home. Upon his return, The Lancet would shower him with praise: “Little children have ever been esteemed the most precious of human possessions all the world over, but it was reserved for an energetic Frenchman to set the seal upon this preciousness by conserving the immature specimens in glass cases.” People might visit his Paris show, the journal wrote, “to obtain resolution of their doubts by ocular demonstration.”

  As for the Germans, Lion said they could keep the machines and proceed without him. And if a pair of American immigrants wanted to license the rights for London, he wouldn’t say no to that.

  * * *

  —

  All that summer in London, the press was lit up. “The Greatest Novelty of the Age!” Well, that was a paid listing. But also, this, in a journal called The Sketch: “It works automatically, thus dispensing with the necessity for incessant watchfulness.” Similar statements were made in the London Times.

  The articles might as well have said: Calling all showmen, give it a go! They couldn’t buy from Altmann? How hard could it be to build a copycat contraption? The lines continued to wind around the Americans’ concession. You can’t upstage a baby.

  Or maybe you could. Just get your own and say it was smaller. The casual observer would never know the difference. It wouldn’t be long before even the Royal Aquarium was in on the act, as if to suggest, Fish, babies, it all comes from the same primordial slop, yes?

  * * *

  —

  Messrs. Coney and Schenkein were not amused by the competition. The letter they sent, written in Martin’s signature style, was nothing short of a work of art, all the better for avoiding any mention of M. Lion.

  On September 18, with the Jubilee still in swing, The Lancet published it.

  Sirs,

  In the interests of the general public we desire to call your attention to the fact that the success of our Infant Incubator Institution at . . . Earl’s Court has attracted the notice of unscrupulous imitators. We are informed, for example, that various persons are calling upon, and writing to, members of the medical profession, hospitals, infirmaries, &c., asking for their support, and falsely representing that they are opening branch institutions in connexion with us, and asking for the loan of children to experiment with.

  We consider, under these circumstances, that it is our duty to warn members of the medical profession, also nurses, parents, and all public institutions, not to entrust their children to any applicants whatsoever without first taking every precaution to assure themselves that they will not be made the victims of showmen, as well as of inexperienced and irresponsible persons who seek to trade upon the established reputation of an invention that has been recognised by both the medical and the lay press.

  The institution at Earl’s Court is the first of its kind in England, and we have not made any arrangements, nor have we given anyone authority to further exhibit, at any exhibition or place of public resort in the United Kingdom, so that all persons, no matter what their credentials may seem to be, making application for space and intimating that they have the power to exhibit Mr. Paul Altmann’s invention should be classed as impostors.

  We are, Sirs, yours obediently,

  Samuel Schenkein

  Martin Coney

  Undeterred, the “impostors” kept at it. By February of 1898, The Lancet’s editors were fed up. While the “favourably noticed” exhibit at Earl’s Court was a serious and well-run endeavor, they wrote, “it attracted the attention and cupidity of public showmen, and all sorts of persons, who had no knowledge of the intricate scientific problem involved, started to organise baby incubator shows just as they might have exhibited marionettes, fat women, or any sort of catch-penny monstrosity. It is therefore necessary that we should at once protest
that human infirmities do not constitute a fit subject for the public showman to exploit.”

  Particularly grievous was a show at the Agricultural Hall, Islington: “Just opposite the incubators there are some leopards and everyone is familiar with the obnoxious odor that arises from cages in which such animals are incarcerated. There is a similar exhibit at the Royal Aquarium, and we cannot think that the dust of bicycle racing, the smoking of the men, and the exhalations from the crowd of people who visit that resort are likely to constitute an atmosphere suitable for prematurely born infants. . . . Is it in keeping with the dignity of science that incubators and living babies should be exhibited amidst the aunt-sallies, the merry-go-rounds, the five-legged mule, the wild animals, the clowns, penny peep-shows, and amidst the glare and noise of a vulgar fair?”

  Obnoxious leopard odors were the least of it. The editors had finally conceded that the incubators weren’t magic ovens. You couldn’t just pop in a baby and wait for it to be done. Somebody needed to keep the machines and every inch of the premises immaculate, or lethal disease could spread. Somebody needed near-infinite patience to properly feed the most delicate mammals on earth. And somebody needed to manage rashes and vomit and excrement and everything else that propels itself out of a baby.

  A bloody lot of work. London’s showmen didn’t give a fig about The Lancet, but it wouldn’t be long before they decided premature infants weren’t worth the bother.

  * * *

  —

  Martin and Sam were already back in America, getting ready for their Omaha show. Martin must have believed that a change was in order. Although his brother Alfons was correct—you were better off keeping under your hat the fact that you were Jewish—his name lacked gravitas. Alfons had a knack for finding trouble. Already he’d spent a night in jail for fisticuffs, for breaking a fellow’s nose at the Gravesend racetrack, fighting over the books. That sounded in keeping with “Coney.” New Yorkers at that time pronounced it “Cooney”—Cooney Island. Mellifluous, yes. But Martin, for the work he planned to do, might need to tweak the spelling.

  Part Two

  SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

  THE MARCH OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY

  In 1933, a twelve-year-old boy took the train from Milwaukee to the Century of Progress in Chicago. His name was Mark Raffel, and he would become my father.

  The first I knew of this visit to the fair was almost seventy years later, after his death, when I opened a drawer in his study and found a half-dozen typewritten pages. This turned out to be an “autobiography” that he had written at the age of sixteen. The fair was mentioned almost as an aside, but it piqued my curiosity. I knew there was a world’s fair in Chicago in the 1890s. It was famous for its Ferris wheel. But in the 1930s?

  * * *

  —

  The official 1933 program for the Century of Progress stated: “Individuals, groups, entire races of man fall into step with the slow or swift movement of the march of science and industry.”

  From the opposite side of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, that notion was disturbing. Unable to let it go, I flew from my home outside New York City to Chicago. There, I spent hours in the History Museum’s research center, squinting at documents and sifting through photographs. The entire spectacle mesmerized me—science and industry as drivers of humanity. The magnificent Hall of Science, the airplanes and the automobiles, the Enchanted Island of rides for happy children, no few of whom would die in World War II.

  But the image I couldn’t shake came from the midway: A body-to-body crowd appears in front of a building with the sign “INFANT INCUBATORS WITH LIVING BABIES.” It seemed to encapsulate everything about this fair: science and industry, married to commerce, bathed in voyeurism. The future generation as commodity. The doctor in charge was named Martin Arthur Couney, and he had impressive credentials. But who would allow their child to be exhibited in this way? That a proven lifesaving technology existed but wasn’t available in most hospitals had never occurred to me, nor was I yet aware of the eugenics exhibit, the real purveyor of babies as product. The incubator show was among the most popular attractions of the entire fair. Even without yet seeing the full picture, it was easy to understand why. Who wouldn’t want to view the inheritors of the Century of Progress baking in their ovens? Given the chance, I’d have done it myself.

  * * *

  —

  Back home, I stumbled across an item about the Coney Island Museum on Surf Avenue. Years ago, as a young woman transplanted from the Midwest, I’d screamed myself hoarse on the Cyclone, but I lacked the deep connection true New Yorkers have. (One man told me, “I loved Coney Island like a person. It had a smiling face.”) Still, I thought the museum might give me some insight into early-twentieth-century midways. I persuaded a friend to join me, and on a bright summer day, we rode the F train underground and up again to its rattling end.

  We found the museum across the street from the new Luna Park, with its whirling, lose-your-lunch rides and its whack-a-moles and its paper-cup piña coladas. Upstairs from the museum’s first-floor “freak bar” were a couple of rooms full of artifacts from the heyday of America’s trippy playground. Photographs and reproductions. Funhouse mirrors. Now you’re fat, now you’re tall. You’ve lost all perspective. Something knocked me for a loop. Coney Island had an incubator sideshow. This wasn’t a special event like the Century of Progress. It lasted forty years, until 1943. How was that even possible? And then I saw the name of the doctor in charge of this thing.

  “It’s him again!” I told my bewildered friend.

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE EMINENT DR. MARTIN ARTHUR COUNÉY

  Omaha, Nebraska, 1898

  The gangly man had a hatbox in his hands. “Is the doctor still around?” he asked. Martin was closing up his concession for the day. And this tall man with the workingman’s hands appeared to be selling something, whatever was in that box. Martin didn’t want to know. “The doctor has left for the night,” he said.

  Eight a.m., another day beginning, and here was this fellow back, still carrying the hatbox.

  Martin had no choice. He had to admit he’d fibbed: He was Dr. Counéy. The visitor handed over the box. “Here is a baby my wife had yesterday about twenty miles from here,” he said. “I been sitting up with it in the park.”

  Martin lifted the lid. Sure enough, the hatbox held a tiny baby, still breathing.

  But decades would pass before Martin would tell this tale—and add, for good measure, that the baby lived.

  * * *

  —

  The Trans-Mississippi Exposition was nothing like the triumph of London for Martin, or Berlin for Alexandre Lion. Omaha was remote. If anything, this fair aimed to poke Chicago. Its Grand Court was called “The New White City.” The original White City—formally, Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893—had set a new American standard, with its alabaster Beaux-Arts refinement, its breathtaking Ferris wheel (see that, M. Eiffel?), its hootchy-kootchy dancers and raunchy shenanigans out on the Midway Plaisance. Culture was worthy, but frankly, the midway was where you made money. Back East at Coney Island, George C. Tilyou, heeding the siren song of coins pinging into the till, opened an amusement park named Steeplechase, after the nearby racetrack. Tilyou knew the country’s thirst for midway entertainment had scarcely been whetted.

  But Omaha was far away from Sodom by the Sea, and no match either for that soot-belching, hog-killing, crime-infested metropolis squatting indelicately on Lake Michigan’s shore. The Trans-Mississippi Exposition would (in theory) be an affair with nicer manners. No immoral entertainment. No “spirituous liquors” sold. The Omaha Bee, on its front page, raved: “To the spectator it would seem that some long forgotten magician had escaped from the dingy covers of an ancient fairy tale and caressed the bare expanse of bluff and stubble with his creative wand.”

  The president was obliged to show up. Every American world’s fair, previous and hen
ceforth, demanded such a visit. Seventy thousand people packed the grounds on October 11 when William McKinley arrived. McKinley had “pushed the button” in Washington, D.C., to formally open the fair on June 1, but now he was here in the flesh. Amid vast quantities of flesh. Malodorous flesh. Can’t-see-a-darn-thing flesh. Perhaps only the dignitaries could fully discern the mock battle of Indian braves staged for the president’s entertainment. Next up on the program, after the “savages” were paraded past McKinley, came the livestock viewings. Said one local booster: “The gay throngs on the Midway cheered him, the old soldiers called his name in endearing terms, and the journey was one of interest and pleasure, with no single word of discourtesy to mar a day filled with many pleasant events.”

  * * *

  —

  Martin’s incubator station sat on the East Midway, not far from the Wild West Show and the camel ride and the Mammoth Whale and the German Village, where presumably he could get something decent to eat. His modest white building looked sleepy. The signs exclaiming “WONDERFUL INVENTION” and “Visited by 207,000 People at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee” seemed almost to be pleading.

  Reporters ignored him. Perhaps his operation was diminished without the exceptional Mlle. Louise. The infants on display might not have been as tiny, by necessity, and possibly that hurt him at the gate.

  Whatever the explanation, the arrival from France of the eminent Dr. Martin Arthur Counéy attracted less notice than, say, the naked French painting in the art pavilion. Before the fair, the latter incited an angry man to fling a chair through the canvas. Repaired, the life-size nude—The Return of Spring by William-Adolphe Bouguereau—drew many new lovers of art.