How a Fake Doctor Ran Carnival Sideshows and Saved Thousands of Infants and Changed Medical History

Speaker 1 (00:13):
And we continue here on our American stories. Don Raffle
was a fiction editor for many years. Raffle's most recent
book The Strange Case of Doctor Cooney, How a mysterious
European showman saved thousands of American babies. Let's take a
listen to this wonderfully unique American story.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
I spent about four years going down a rabbit hole
of research to find out what was the deal with
one of the strangest stories in American medical history. So
early in the twentieth century, if you were to go
to Coney Island of the People's Playground, also known affectionately

(00:55):
as Sodom by the Sea for its high jinks, or
if you were to go to Atlantic City, which at
the time was America's honeymoon capital, or if you were
to go to say a theme park in Chicago or Minneapolis,
you would pass an exhibit that would say infant incubators
with real living babies, and there would be a barker

(01:18):
outside and you could pay a quarter to go see
living premature babies being cared for in incubators. So when
I first stumbled across this, I thought, how is this
even possible? Is this the most crazy exploitation of human life.
Is this a commodification of babies? Well, it turned out

(01:41):
to be even stranger than that. There was almost no
care for premature babies available in American hospitals at that time.
So if somebody had a baby and a tiny one
two or three pounds, their best hope was to take
the baby home and maybe rapid in blankets, keep it
warm next to the oven or the fire, and hope

(02:04):
for the best. And often the best was not very good.
Along came this man, doctor Martin Arthur Cooney, who was
behind all of these side shows. Who was he? He claimed
that he was a European doctor, that he had trained
in Leipzig and Berlin that would have been some of

(02:26):
the best medical training in the world at that time.
And then he was the protege of a great French
doctor who was conveniently dead at the time that Martin
Cooney was making these claims, And that he then came
to the United States for the very first time in
eighteen ninety eight for the Omaha World's Fair to show

(02:48):
this new technology, the infant incubator. Now his story becomes
very odd because apparently, according to him, he was just
seized with the desire to relocate across an ocean. Seriously,
why once you've seen Omaha you can never return to Paris.

(03:09):
I think I will give up my really prestigious institutional
affiliation with one of the world's great doctors in France
so that I can practice medicine on Coney Island next
to the Shoot, the Shoots and the alligator Boy. Okay,
it's not too much of a spoiler to say Martin
Cooney really wasn't a real doctor. However, he knew how

(03:34):
to save premies and he was willing to do it
when the medical establishment really couldn't and wouldn't do it.
So here's this guy who actually did pick up a
European protocol. He hired fantastic nurses, and let me tell you,
in a neonatal ICEU, the nurses are always the secret

(03:55):
sauce that has a lot to do with whether or
not the babies survive. He had these great machines, the
new incubators. He also offered the most meticulous care, very
low nurse to patient ratio. Insistent on feeding these babies
breast milk only if the mother couldn't provide it, he

(04:16):
hired wet nurses. The premises were immaculate. He was a
big believer in really loving these babies, love them, hug them,
show them, real human care. This was very much at
odds with anything that was available in the hospitals for
a long time. At the time, the hospitals really didn't

(04:36):
have the resources to have enough equipment. They didn't have
enough nurses, they didn't have enough space. Hospitals were sometimes
not all that clean. They couldn't afford to hire wet nurses.
They would feed the baby's formula that was not as successful.
So here is this doctor Cooney, fake doctor, saving children

(04:58):
over the years by the desperately trying to persuade the
medical establishment. And yes, admittedly, because this guy was charging
admission to the public, he was becoming very wealthy himself.
I don't really think he saw a conflict between doing
good and his own personal self interest. There were people

(05:20):
who faulted him for that, but he continued, and you
would think the medical establishment would catch on and say, hey,
you know, here's this guy. He's getting real results. He's
saving eighty five percent of these children who should be
considered pretty much doomed. However, there were a few things

(05:40):
going on, one of which unfortunately, was the American eugenics movement,
which was really about taking the new science of genetics
and using it to try to manipulate the human gene stock.
It ended up in absolutely horrific abuses, including the involuntary
sterilism of tens of thousands of Americans and the decision

(06:04):
to sometimes deliberately withhold care from infants who had severe disabilities.
And it didn't directly target prettymature babies, but it did
cast a shadow over their prospects. There was really a
sense of you know, why do we need to care
for these weaklings, these feeble babies. We have more than

(06:26):
enough hungry mouths to feed. The mother will have another
child and so on. So the resources were just lacking.
Over time, Martin Cooney had one great friend in Chicago,
doctor Julius Hess, and Julius Hess was really everything Martin
Cooney wasn't. He was a real doctor, He did have
real credentials, he was very highly respected, and he began

(06:50):
listening to doctor Cooney, learning from him, taking his practices
into the hospital setting, and desperately desperately struggling for funding,
struggling to get people to listen to him. He published
the first book on taking care of Premies in this
Country in nineteen twenty two, in which he dedicated his
book to doctor Cooney. But something that really turned the

(07:14):
tide was in nineteen thirty three, at the bottom of
the Depression, there was a World's Fair in Chicago. It's
not the famous World's Fair that most people think of
with the ferris wheel and that's featured in the book
Devil in the White City. This was a Depression era
World's Fair and Doctor Cooney and Doctor Has joined forces

(07:35):
to have a big incubator show. It was right out
on the Midway with the side shows and other Midway attractions. Meanwhile,
in the Hall of Science you had a eugenics exhibit,
But the actual work of saving lives was happening on
the Midway, and there was so much publicity for this
particular show that it did begin to turn the tide.

(07:58):
Chicago became the first city with a really unified public
health policy in order to take care of premies. It
would eventually become the model for the rest of the country.
So if we really want to look at it, there
are many people beginning to believe that, yes, you know,
this phony doctor with the sideshow is actually the rightful

(08:22):
father of American neoonetology. He saved thousands and thousands of people,
some of them are still alive. I've talked to a
bunch of them. I will tell you not a one
of them feels annoyed that they were displayed in a
side show. Not a one of them feels like they
were exploited in any way, and not one of them

(08:43):
is irritated that he wasn't a real doctor. They feel
only gratitude that this man saved their life and they
went on to have wonderful lives and have children and
have grandchildren. Without Martin Cooney, they probably would not be here.
So we sometimes owe a debt to people who work

(09:04):
really far outside the lines, and Martin Cooney is one
of them. Another really interesting thing about doctor Cooney is
that when hospitals began introducing incubators, and it really became
very widespread after World War Two, when American healthcare in
general just got better and better, that first generation of

(09:27):
preemies treated in hospitals with incubators, a great many of
them very sadly went blind and they couldn't understand what
was going on. And Martin Cooney, by that point was
already retired, but they did go to ask him, why
is it that none of the babies you treated lost
their eyesight? And frankly, he really didn't know. Well, he

(09:50):
wasn't a doctor, and nobody knew why this was going on.
The truth was the hospitals were pumping too much oxygen
into the machines that was causing blindness. And Martin Cooney,
although he pumped oxygen into the machines, it was never
as much. And hey, he was a showman, so he
would actually take the babies out of the machines and
show them off and because of that, because of that,

(10:15):
their eyesight was preserved. So again, just a little piece
of lost medical history. And I hope you enjoy the story.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (10:25):
And that was Dawn Raffle, and thanks down for that
really interesting story. And so much work is done outside
the boundaries of whatever the establishment thinks in almost any field.
The strange case of doctor Cooney here on our American
Stories