The Showman who saved 6500 lives

via Atlas Obscura: When Infants in Incubators were sideshow attractions:

The premise of the attraction was straightforward enough: pay an entrance fee to see something you wouldn’t usually be able to see.

What set Couney’s sideshow apart was that his subjects were premature babies in incubators, receiving care that hospitals did not provide.

The entrance fees he collected went toward his operating costs, including round-the-clock care and wet nurses. Couney did not charge the parents of his tiny patients.

Couney visited the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo with his baby incubators, 1901. PUBLIC DOMAIN

Reporting in 1903, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle described the “seriousness and value of the system shown.” A visit to Couney’s showcase revealed rows of warmed, glass-fronted incubators supplied with filtered air, containing “little pitiful pinched looking waifs… the only things that indicate that they are alive are the healthy color of their little faces and the faint flutterings of movement which are perceptible on closer inspection.”

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NPR story of one of these children:

Lucille Horn was one of them. Born in 1920, she, too, ended up in an incubator on Coney Island.
"My father said I was so tiny, he could hold me in his hand," she tells her own daughter, Barbara, on a visit with StoryCorps in Long Island, N.Y. "I think I was only about 2 pounds, and I couldn't live on my own. I was too weak to survive."
She'd been born a twin, but her twin died at birth. And the hospital didn't show much hope for her, either: The staff said they didn't have a place for her; they told her father that there wasn't a chance in hell that she'd live.
"They didn't have any help for me at all," Horn says. "It was just: You die because you didn't belong in the world."
But her father refused to accept that for a final answer. He grabbed a blanket to wrap her in, hailed a taxicab and took her to Coney Island — and to Dr. Couney's infant exhibit.Dr. Martin Couney holds Beth Allen, one of his incubator babies, at Luna Park in Coney Island. This photo was taken in 1941.Courtesy of Beth Allen"How do you feel knowing that people paid to see you?" her daughter asks.
"It's strange, but as long as they saw me and I was alive, it was all right," Horn says. "I think it was definitely more of a freak show. Something that they ordinarily did not see."
Horn's healing was on display for paying customers for quite a while. It was only after six months that she finally left the incubators.
Years later, Horn decided to return to see the babies — this time as a visitor. When she stopped in, Couney happened to be there, and she took the opportunity to introduce herself.
"And there was a man standing in front of one of the incubators looking at his baby," Horn says, "and Dr. Couney went over to him and he tapped him on the shoulder."
"Look at this young lady," Couney told the man then. "She's one of our babies. And that's how your baby's gonna grow up."