History RaeTold

The heroic career of martin couney; or, if in doubt, put a bunch of babies in boxes

Hey, who wants to hear about babies in boxes?

Because this is a story about babies in boxes.

Back in the days before prenatal or postnatal care or any basic common empathy in medicine, people were of the belief that premature babies were weak and dumb and deserved to die for not being born strong enough, and that God didn’t want them to be alive in the first place. Quite why God had allowed the babies to reach the point of actually being born before killing them off wasn’t clear, because if I know nothing else (and I really do know nothing else), I know that bigots half-ass everything.

But then, one man came along to change all this. The hero of tiny godless babies everywhere, our boy Martin Couney was a German Jewish US immigrant and a complete madman. He claimed to be a doctor who studies in Leipzig and Berlin and trained under renowned obstetrician Pierre-Constant Budin, but, to quote his Wikipedia article, “there is no good reason to believe that he was a trained medical doctor at all” so who fucking knows. He was probably just a bananas dude who rolled in off the street and started putting babies in boxes. It was the early 20th century, you could do that if you were a reasonably well-spoken white dude.

ANYWAY Martin was like “hold the fucking phone, have we tried not letting premature babies just die? Because I have a wild theory that, if we just gave the babies a little extra medical care and attention, they’d probs be fine”. And, I assume, the rest of the medical community was like “shut up Martin, you’re not even a real doctor and anyway, we enjoy letting babies die”. But Martin didn’t listen, because he was a smart and empathetic man, and also a maniac.

And so he started putting babies in boxes.

To be more specific, he developed the first incubator, where premature babies could be treated in an environment that simulated the womb, with oxygen and warmth and vaguely decent standards of care. He also hired wet nurses, because he’d heard that babies preferred breast milk to callous neglect and death.

HOWEVER, making heated baby boxes and hiring competent adults with milky boobs to tend to the box-babies was expensive. Not only that, but our boy Martin was a socialist and didn’t want to charge parents money for saving their child’s life. Oh Martin, my heart. So what did he do? Well, he did what any reasonable man would do in this situation.

HE CREATED A TRAVELLING PREMATURE BABY FREAK SHOW.

Yep, Dr (?) Martin Couney was famous for taking his boxes of infant on the road, displaying them at fairs. He first tried this at the Berlin Exposition, where everyone was like “Jesus, Martin, what are you doing? Are those babies in boxes? What the fuck Martin? You’re not even a doctor, how did you get past security?”

So then he decided that, fuck Germany, the USA was the kind of country that would really appreciate a good travelling premature baby freak show. So he and his baby boxes hopped on a boat to the States, where he began travelling the country and charging people at various expos and world fairs 25 cents each to look at his box babies.

He eventually found himself a regular gig at a literal freak show at Luna Park on Coney Island, which included such delights as a tribe “transported” (read as: human trafficked) from the Philippines, a reenactment of the Boer War performed by real Boer War veterans (what the fuck) and a “midget village”. Do you have any idea what a midget village is? Because I don’t, and I am absolutely not looking it up because it sounds horrific. If you do know, please don’t tell me. Just fester in that awful knowledge on your own.

And in the midst of all this weird shit… our boy Martin and a bunch of babies in boxes! Martin was actually really against the idea that his travelling premature baby freak show was, um, a freak show, insisting that it was, in fact, a serious medical hospital. Which, in fairness, it was, but it was also in the middle of an actual fairground so just, like, own it, ok?

As well as running his now world-famous travelling premature baby freak show, he also went around making speeches advocating for the rights of premature babies (did you know that Napoleon was born prematurely? Because Martin sure did. Probably explains why he was so small) because he was an unbelievable babe. For real, I have such a crush on this dead lunatic.

He also paid all his staff a good living wage. What a BOY.

At the time, many children’s rights groups tried to shut Martin’s operation down, saying that his travelling premature baby freak show was somehow exploitative, and that he was using the babies for profit. Which is, of course, a far worse thing to do than just letting the babies die. This was clearly the fucking PETA of children’s rights groups.

But our hero, our boy Martin would not be shut down. In fact, in 1940, 37 years after he first opened his travelling premature baby freakshow, incubators were introduced into actual, non-freak show hospitals, where they save countless lives to this day.

Over the course of his career, Martin saved literally thousands of babies’ lives. He would hold “homecomings” for the babies who “graduated” from his boxes in order to prove that all his weird shit worked and wasn’t just some bizarre fetish of a man who loved to put babies in boxes. Many of his box babies would visit him every Fathers’ Day and, when he died in 1950, hundreds of them attended his funeral. In fact, some of his box babies are still alive today. One of them’s called Beth.

Most of the stories I tell you seem to involve a lot of violence and death and, in one case, Satanic baby sacrifice, but this one is genuinely delightful, with a lovely happy ending. Not even any incest.

Doesn’t feel right.

I’ll make sure the next one has some brutal torture or something, to make up for it.