The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

by Dawn Raffel

  LITTLE MISS COUNEY ARRIVES

  New York City, 1907

  On a sweat-drenched bed in upper Manhattan, a woman was writhing in labor. This child was six weeks early. In the frigid dead of winter, the woman’s swelling belly would not have been visible under her heavy dresses, her woolen overcoat.

  Martin, at the threshold of the bedroom, must have been calculating quickly. He picked up the phone and placed a call.

  A final push and the baby was out.

  One of Martin’s friends, a man with a 90-horsepower automobile, was on his way to Coney Island, an hour each way, to retrieve an incubator out of winter storage.

  Meanwhile, Martin plunged the tiny girl into ice-cold water to shock her into breathing.

  Both youngster and mother were doing just fine, he told The Brooklyn Eagle the following day, along with this mildly improbable version of the entire story. The paper reported that the three-pound newborn promised “to develop into a healthy Miss Couney.”

  * * *

  —

  Four adults were living in the Couneys’ Harlem apartment: Martin, Maye, her mother, and Louise. Martin was Jewish. Maye was Protestant. Hildegarde Couney was baptized Catholic, as thirty-five-year-old “Aunt Louise,” the woman who would raise her, had been. Thirty-one-year-old Maye would have no other children. And no one would file a birth certificate for Hildegarde until 1926.

  “WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?”

  I was riding the train to Brooklyn again, in spite of myself, convinced this would be yet another wasted day.

  By the time I arrived at the Kings County probate archive, it was three p.m. “We’re closed,” the man behind the counter said. Then he relented. “As long as you’re here, I guess you can take a look.”

  He led me to an enormous wooden card catalogue, the kind every library used to have. I figured this wouldn’t take long.

  Tens of thousands of people have wills on file here. Martin Arthur Couney isn’t one of them. Of course not, I thought. Then I noticed something: Annabelle Maye Couney had left a will. And so had Hildegarde.

  * * *

  —

  And so I came back and stayed for hours. Louise Recht had a will on file, too, and so did Isador Schulz, the cousin who lived with them in later years, serving as “Dr. Schulz” at Coney Island when the family was away. The wills, for the most part, told the story of money and objects, as wills are meant to do.

  Annabelle Maye Couney was the one who had purchased the crypt in Cypress Hills. It had cost her $1,350. An itemized list of assets included a diamond bracelet and a diamond watch and diamond rings and a diamond brooch; and the family’s house in Sea Gate, Brooklyn, which was in her name. The inventory listed every silver-plated tray, every platter and bowl and candlestick, every spoon and shaker, sugar bowl and creamer, every glass (one hundred twenty-six, not counting the wineglasses), the bonbon dish and napkin rings (six)—all the stuff of our lives that tells our stories in the language of things. This was a tale of company-for-dinner and evenings on the town, of loveliness that sparkled and shone in a beautiful home by the ocean. If only we could reassemble the woman from the jewels, the home from the silver and crystal.

  The sole odd thing in this will, and the reason it ended up going through probate, was the special fund set aside for Hildegarde, into which both Isador Schulz and Louise Recht had been putting money. It seemed slightly strange for the nurse to be funding the daughter of her wealthy employers, but who knew?

  Hildegarde and Annabelle Maye Couney.

  Hildegarde’s will told a far sadder story. When she died, she was destitute. Her probate folder contained the usual pages of legalese, but where she was buried remained a mystery. In the back of the folder, beneath all the duplicates and triplicates, was a three-page typewritten statement. Anne J. Boylan identified herself as a longtime family friend. “Deponent during the lifetime of Dr. Martin A. Couney, Mrs. Couney and Hildegarde Couney, the deceased, had many conversations with the aforementioned ones concerning the family background, their relatives and their parents and the three of them gave me the following information . . .”

  By now I was squirming in my metal chair at my table in the windowless archive, wishing I could jump up and down without looking utterly nuts. Anne J. Boylan’s sworn account was riddled with misspellings, including misspellings of names. Some of the information in her account would turn out to be wrong. Perhaps she had misheard or misremembered or perhaps she had been told the wrong thing in the first place. Maybe the person taking her oral statement was tired or bored and dreaming of a day at the beach. Alfons Coney, for instance, was listed as Alfons Torny. Mrs. Couney had no siblings, the statement said, and that wasn’t true either. Martin, who’d “invented” the incubators, never held any kind of patent. But what was in these pages was a start—a real start.

  I tried to imagine Anne J. Boylan in a neatly pressed dress and respectable heels on a hot summer day, setting the record down. Had Hildegarde asked her friend to do this, knowing her days were ending? Had Anne J. Boylan taken the task upon herself? Her words had been waiting sixty years for somebody to find them, long after her own death. As she made her deposition, did she wonder for a moment, Who will remember me?

  In addition to her testimony, Anne J. Boylan had added another slip of paper to the file. This was a legal certificate of name change from 1903.

  Yes, yes, yes, I thought. Gotcha, Michael Cohn.

  And then I imagined Anne J. Boylan saying, Well, what took you so long?

  ALL THE PRETTY PREEMIES

  New York City and Chicago, 1909

  The headline read, “Wipe Hall with Doctor’s Body.” Not what Martin wanted to see when he picked up the evening paper, given that he was the doctor in question. And if the words were biliously familiar, it was because he had the original poison pen letter in his possession. He’d have preferred not to share it with the city’s bottom-feeding readers.

  Maye’s cousin Carolina Mastanka had been staying with the family, which had moved to a larger apartment at Hancock Court in Harlem. In slushy February, a scoundrel encountered Carolina at a dance and, claiming he’d fallen in love at first sight, appeared to have taken scandalous liberties.

  Martin delivered an ultimatum.

  The culprit struck back in arsenic ink.

  Dr. Couney:

  It has come to my knowledge that you have issued certain statements to the effect that it is impossible for Miss Carolina Mastanka to return to her cousin’s home unless she marries me. As your reputation as a dirty liar, far and near, is well known, it is useless for me to deny it. But I write you this to warn you that if you ever again mention her or my name in anything but a respectful way, I should consider it my duty to call and wipe up the hall of Hancock Court with your worthless carcass.

  Although I prefer to show clemency to those socially and mentally below me, there is a limit to what I will take. If you are any kind of gentleman and not the coward I consider you, and desire satisfaction, I am willing to oblige you anywhere, at any time, in any way.

  Very truly, Capt. Paul Mason, late of Nassau Volunteers, U.S.A., and Peruvian Army

  Where, oh where, was Alfons when you needed him? His brother might have scared the cocky britches off the captain by calling his bluff. In fact, he might have roughed him up. Martin, choosing the higher road, hauled Paul Mason before a judge. The latter was ordered to stay away from Hancock Court and put away his pen.

  * * *

  —

  Martin didn’t need this kind of attention. Not all publicity was good, despite what Thompson and Dundy might have argued. This scurrilous nonsense interfered with getting people to take him seriously—a pursuit already hobbled by his carnival surroundings.

  Maye and Louise could almost always save the babies in their immediate care. To win the larger battle of persuasion, he needed the public’s ear. If ever he lost the goodwill
of the press, his mission would be sunk.

  Often, the Couneys spent at least the better part of the summer in Chicago, where Maye had done her training, leaving Coney Island in Louise’s redoubtable hands. A physician named Solomon Fischel worked alongside her. Solomon Fischel was wealthy, and he, like Samuel Schenkein, owned shares in what was now the Infant Incubator Company, a privilege Martin presumably couldn’t afford. Solomon’s specialty in Europe had been vision, but the salient issue, as far as the board of health was concerned, was that he was licensed to practice medicine in New York. He could examine a child (if less perspicaciously than Louise), and he could put his signature on a death certificate, an act forbidden to Martin.

  * * *

  —

  The Couneys set up shop in Riverview, an amusement park that tickled Chicago’s psyche, as Coney Island did New York’s, with a second show in a rival park named White City, after the world’s fair.

  Chicago’s papers loved Couney, the Tribune in particular. On June 5, 1905, a coy item peeped out from under the headline “Incubators Save Babies Life” [sic]. A child weighing under two pounds had been rushed by private automobile to the White City, and while her identity was held in “strictest secrecy,” the paper could divulge that the baby was “heiress to considerable property.” Eventually, the daughter of the Trib’s own editor, James Keeley, would be rushed to an incubator and saved. But long before that happened, the Tribune began hosting benefit days at both amusement parks, with proceeds from the concessions going toward helping the city’s newborns. For the 1907 fete, Martin and Maye staged a toddler parade with their graduates dressed up as French dolls. Too cute to resist. And while he was at it, he gave the Tribune’s charity 50 percent of the gate.

  * * *

  —

  Chicago was arguably the cradle of American neonatology. Dr. Joseph Bolivar DeLee had founded the city’s Lying-in Hospital in 1895 “to succor poor women during confinement.” By 1899, the year after the eminent Dr. Martin Counéy made his debut in Omaha, DeLee had two Lion-type incubators; by 1902, he had four. But he struggled constantly for funding, relying on women’s charities to keep the obstetrics ward afloat. The primary goal was to prevent mothers from dying in childbirth. He would end up turning his incubators over to a colleague, Dr. Isaac Abt, who founded Sarah Morris Children’s Hospital in 1913. Isaac Abt did what he could—which, given his very limited resources, was nowhere near enough.

  If you had to be born premature, you’d better do it during the summer, when the sideshows were running. Born in winter, whether in Chicago or New York, you were most likely out of luck.

  Not that Martin and Maye were doing nothing. The colder months were devoted to logistics and arrangements for the upcoming season, including hiring doctors—often young ones—to satisfy the local board of health at outposts like the Wonderland Amusement Park in Minneapolis and Revere Beach, Massachusetts. These “assistants” could examine patients, and with the help of the nurses Maye or Louise had trained, they could run the concessions when the Couneys weren’t on-site. Once in a while, they had to sign a death certificate. But mostly, this was a sweet gig for a novice doctor, a specialized education wrapped in cotton candy. Just leave it off the résumé. A summer’s adventure, and if these young doctors had questions about their convivial boss, they tended not to press. He never made it entirely clear why they, and not he, were filling out paperwork. Sometimes he said that despite his extensive training in Europe, he didn’t quite have an American license; other times, he was sublimely oblique.

  * * *

  —

  Dr. Julius Hess began his medical practice in Chicago in 1902—the year during which, back East, Dr. Matthew D. Mann and his colleagues continued to bicker bitterly over who was to blame for McKinley’s death, and Messrs. Schenkein and Coney were trying to resurrect their business.

  Austere, with a commanding presence, Julius Hess was everything Martin Couney was not. After earning a medical degree from Northwestern University, he’d continued his education with postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins, followed by studies in Germany and Austria. The two men’s affects were as different as their training (or lack thereof). Where Martin was effusive, Julius was measured. Where Martin depended on continental elegance to mask a whiff of impropriety, Julius was an incontrovertibly dignified presence. Where Martin encouraged people to call him “Uncle Martin,” no one who was not, biologically, Julius Hess’s niece or nephew would ever address him as Uncle, nor—a student later wrote—would anyone call him Doc. And only his closest friends would address him as Julius instead of Dr. Hess.

  Upon his return to Chicago from Europe, he opened a general practice, and arrived in his horse-drawn carriage at his patients’ homes. If, over breakfast with his wife, Clara, a couple of years later, he happened to pick up a paper—say, the Tribune, or another of his choice—he would have seen news of the doctor who’d come to town with his baby-saving devices.

  Despite his stiff demeanor, Julius Hess was a man with an open mind. And for all he enjoyed club memberships and accolades, a fine house, a wife—for him, that would never be enough. He was reaching for significance.

  In later years, Julius Hess was unwavering and public in his support of Martin. Other doctors would state that it was largely Martin who taught him how to treat preemies, and that he would continue to adapt the showman’s ideas. Yet the Chicago physician never recorded precisely when they met. Morris Fishbein would eventually write an obituary for Hess, in which he said the friendship began with Hess serving as the licensed physician when the White City opened. Some of the Couney buffs took this to mean 1914, owing to confusion over when the White City shows ran. The last record of Martin in Chicago’s theme parks is 1909, and it’s reasonable to suspect the meeting came closer to 1905, toward the beginning of Hess’s career.

  Julius Hess was six years Martin’s junior. For all his reserve and despite their opposing styles, he genuinely liked the showman. Impossible to ignore was the fact that the incubators and the entire system of nursing worked. Although neither man knew at the time, the synergy between their abilities and temperaments would have a profound effect.

  * * *

  —

  More than five hundred babies had passed through Chicago’s incubators by the time the 1909 competition for best preemie was held. That Sunday morning, the children were brought to the White City concession dressed in their finest attire. Ruffles and ribbons, buttons and bows. Martin, fluent in baby talk as any other tongue, was having the time of his life.

  When the judges selected three-year-old Burton Douglas Stevens of Perry Avenue as the healthiest, handsomest, and best-developed preemie, Martin presented the child with a little red wagon. As had become his habit, he made sure the reporters saw Little Miss Couney, now a chubby two-year-old, with a bow on top of her head.

  He also seized the opportunity to state his desire to open a permanent incubator station in Chicago, with government help. He hoped it would happen within a year, two at most. How could it not?

  MAGNETIC TAPE

  Shortly after Beth Allen suggested that I find Dr. Lawrence Gartner, I realized he had been William Silverman’s colleague—the last of the original Couney buffs still living. I also knew that Dr. Gartner was a highly regarded neonatologist, with credentials from Johns Hopkins, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the University of Chicago, where he’d been professor and chairman of the Department of Pediatrics and director of Wyler Children’s Hospital. He was now professor emeritus of pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Chicago. And he’d been chairman of the board of the American Pediatric Society. I hoped he’d help me—and I figured that before I asked, I should do him the courtesy of knowing what I was talking about, maybe having some information to share.

  Armed with Anne J. Boylan’s testimony, I was ready. I found an address for a Lawrence Gartner outside San Diego and wrote to him. Three days later,
my phone rang. Larry, as he identified himself, remained fascinated by the incubator doctor.

  “His name was Cohn,” he said.

  Oh.

  Larry had gleaned that fact from Martin Couney’s niece and her husband more than thirty years earlier. But the couple didn’t have all the answers. “Was he born in Alsace?” he asked.

  “Krotoschin.” I had found this on multiple legal documents, including his immigration record, marriage license, and passport application. (A family member would later confirm it.)

  “Krotoschin? Where is that?”

  And then we were off and running. Lawrence Gartner had cassettes of his interviews with people who’d known Martin Couney during his lifetime. These were made in the 1970s. By the time I came late to this party, the sole living person I’d found who (a) had some connection to Martin Couney and (b) had not drawn breath in one of his machines was George C. Tilyou III, grandson of the founder of Steeplechase Park. Mr. Tilyou was eighty-nine years old when we had a chat. His memory was elusive—I was asking him to retrieve a gleaming sliver from his adolescence. George Tilyou recalled two things. “He was very altruistic,” he said. “And he was grouchy.”

  Grouchy? This was at odds with his public persona. But by the late 1930s, Martin Couney had plenty of reasons not to be in a swell mood. And, as Tilyou noted, one year before his own death, at the age of ninety, it’s natural for a teenage boy to perceive an old man as grouchy.

  For months, I had been wishing that I could find someone who knew Martin Couney in his prime.

  Lawrence Gartner had never transcribed the tapes. They’d been meant for a book he had planned to write, many years ago.