They Put Living Babies on Display at the World’s Fair — And Nobody Asked Where They Came From

The photograph stopped me cold. I was scrolling through an online auction archive, looking at old Coney Island ephemera, postcards, ticket stubs, and the usual nostalgia. And then there it was. A glass box. Inside the glass box, a baby. Tiny, shriveled, weighing barely two pounds. Behind the glass box, a sign in block letters that read, “Living babies in incubators.” And behind the sign, visible through the open doorway, stood the wooden scaffolding of a roller coaster. The image was from 1903. The baby was real. The roller coaster was at Luna Park, and the exhibit was sandwiched between a sword swallower and something called Lionel the lion-faced man. That photograph led me into one of the strangest chapters in American history.

For 47 years, from 1896 to 1943, premature infants were collected from hospitals across the country and placed in glass incubators on display at world’s fairs, amusement parks, and boardwalk sideshows. Visitors paid 25 cents to look at them. The man running the operation called himself a doctor. He was not. He claimed degrees from universities in Leipzig and Berlin, but no records confirm this. He changed his name at least twice and fabricated virtually every detail of his professional biography. Over the course of four decades, he claimed he saved 6,500 babies that the medical establishment had left to die. His name, or at least the name he chose for himself, was Dr. Martin Arthur Couney. He was born Michael Cohn in 1869 in Krotoszyn, a town in what was then Prussian Poland. He arrived in America as a teenager. The 1910 census lists his occupation not as a physician, but as a dealer in surgical instruments. He claimed to have studied under Dr. Pierre Constant Budin, the French obstetrician considered the founder of modern neonatal medicine, but the timeline does not work. Couney appears to have immigrated to the United States by 1888, when he was 19—too young to have completed the medical training he described, and too young to have been Budin’s protégé. And yet, for reasons that still are not fully understood, this man with no verified credentials became the only person in America consistently saving premature babies. He did not do it in a hospital or a research facility; he did it in a tent at Coney Island, right next to the freak show.

Here is what makes this story impossible to dismiss as a simple curiosity: in the early 1900s, American hospitals did not treat premature babies. I need you to sit with that for a moment. They did not even try. Premature infants were classified as “weaklings,” a medical term used without irony. The prevailing view, published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1901, was that it might not even be worthwhile to save them. Three out of four premature babies died, and the medical establishment was fine with that. As late as 1939, a typical New York hospital might have one single incubator—just one. Couney had dozens, staffed around the clock by five wet nurses and more than 15 trained medical technicians who lived on-site. His survival rate was 85%. He never charged the parents a dime. Every cent came from the 25-cent admission tickets of people who wandered in off the boardwalk after eating a hot dog.

Now, I know the obvious objection: this sounds like exploitation. Babies on display for profit. A fake doctor running a sideshow medical operation. And the objection is not unreasonable. The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children tried to shut Couney down multiple times. Medical professionals called him a quack and a “baby swapper.” His nurses would slide a diamond ring over a baby’s entire wrist to show the crowd how impossibly small these infants were. He sometimes dressed recovering babies in oversized clothes to emphasize their fragility. This was showmanship; there is no getting around that. But here is what the objection misses: the hospitals would not do it. The technology existed, the incubators worked, and the institutions that could have saved these children chose not to. Couney’s sideshow was not competing with legitimate medicine; it was replacing medicine that refused to exist.

And that refusal was not accidental; it was ideological. This is where the story turns dark. Because the same decades that Couney was saving babies at world’s fairs, those exact same fairgrounds were hosting something else. Starting in 1908 at the Louisiana State Fair, a new kind of competition appeared. They called them “better babies contests.” Infants between 6 and 48 months old were brought in by their parents, measured, weighed, examined, and scored on physical health, mental development, and physical appearance. The judging system was borrowed directly from livestock evaluation. A 1913 article described the process plainly: “A physician scores a baby in precisely the same way as a judge of experience in livestock scores cattle, horses, and hogs.” By 1906, more than 47,000 babies had been rated in contests held across the majority of American states. The Woman’s Home Companion magazine sponsored them nationally, created a “Better Babies Bureau,” and commissioned a bronze medal for the winners. One 3-year-old boy named William Charles Flynn won 14 first prizes and was publicly matched for a proposed eugenic marriage with a 17-month-old girl who had scored equally well. Newspapers ran the headline, “Mate found for perfect boy.” And if you are wondering whether these contests had a racial dimension, they excluded African-American children entirely. The standard of perfection was white by design.

But the contests were just the polished surface. Underneath was something far worse. In November 1915, a Chicago surgeon named Dr. Harry Haiselden was called to examine a newborn baby at the German-American Hospital. The baby, Alan Bollinger, had been born with multiple birth defects. Haiselden refused to operate; he told the parents to let the baby die. Alan Bollinger lived five days. Eight hours before the baby died, the Chicago Commissioner of Health examined him and later testified that the condition was treatable—that he would have operated if the baby had been his patient. It did not matter. Haiselden told the press he had let at least six disabled infants die. He estimated this was happening at a rate of at least one per day in Chicago alone. A coroner’s jury of six physicians cleared him. Helen Keller wrote an article supporting his decision. And in 1917, Haiselden produced and starred in a propaganda film called The Black Stork, dramatizing his crusade. The newspaper advertisement read, “Kill defectives, save the nation, and see The Black Stork.” That film played in theaters across America for over a decade.

I keep returning to the geography of this. The same fairgrounds, the same decades. In one building, Martin Couney is fighting to keep premature babies alive in glass incubators. In another building, judges are scoring babies like livestock for genetic fitness. Down the midway, eugenics panels explain why “defective” humans should be eliminated. And in theaters across the country, a film is playing that argues certain babies are better off dead. This was not a fringe position; it was the mainstream. Indiana passed the first compulsory sterilization law in 1907. By 1927, the Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization in Buck v. Bell, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing the now-infamous line, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Between 1907 and 1963, the state ordered more than 64,000 compulsory sterilizations. More than 60% were performed on women. The eugenics movement was not hiding; it was winning. And the babies Couney was saving were exactly the kind of “defectives” the movement wanted eliminated.

Now, pull the lens back further to the same decades—1854 to 1929. While Couney is displaying premature babies at amusement parks and eugenicists are scoring infants at state fairs, something else is happening: the orphan trains. Between 1854 and 1929, an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 children were loaded onto trains in East Coast cities and shipped to rural families across the Midwest. The Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital ran the programs. Children were lined up at train stops and inspected by prospective families in scenes that witnesses compared to livestock auctions. As many as 25% of these children had living parents. The Foundling Hospital sewed numbered tags into the children’s clothing for identification. Catholic and Protestant organizations ran separate trains to ensure children were placed with same-faith families. By the time the last train ran in 1929, a quarter-million children had been redistributed across the country with remarkably little documentation. No comprehensive database exists. Most of these children never reconnected with their biological families. An estimated 2 million descendants are alive today, many with no idea their family tree passes through an orphan train depot.

Here is where I need to be careful because I am about to describe a pattern, and patterns can be deceiving. Maybe I am seeing connections where only coincidence exists. Maybe these are simply parallel events sharing a timeline and nothing more. But consider this: between 1900 and the 1920s, hundreds of postcards circulated across Europe and the United States depicting babies growing in cabbage patches—not as jokes, but as birth announcements. Known in the French-speaking world as faire-parts de naissance, these postcards showed infants being harvested from gardens, fished from rivers, hatched from eggs, or transported by train. They were produced in multiple countries, in multiple languages, by anonymous studios. Salvador Dalí collected them; André Breton collected them. The genre was so prolific that scholars still cannot account for the sheer volume. Some of the postcards, when translated, reference repopulation, relocation, and the selling of babies. And they occurred in the exact same decades as the incubator exhibits, the orphan trains, the eugenics contests, and the mass sterilization programs.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe there is no connective tissue between a carnival showman saving babies in glass boxes, a medical establishment deciding which infants deserve to live, a system shipping 200,000 children across the country by rail, and hundreds of anonymous postcards depicting babies as agricultural products. Maybe these are all independent phenomena that happened to share a timeline, a geography, and an institutional infrastructure. But once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The pattern repeats with unsettling precision.

On May 27, 1911, a fire broke out at Coney Island’s Dreamland Park. The blaze started at the Hell Gate ride during last-minute repairs before opening day. Within 20 minutes, 10 acres of buildings were engulfed. More than 80 animals perished. A lion named Black Prince escaped, was chased up an incline track, and was shot by police as thousands watched from below. And inside the incubator building, smoke poured through the doorway toward six premature babies. Dr. Fischer and the nurses rushed in, wrapped each baby in blankets, and carried them into the street. According to one account, Coney Island’s “human marvels”—the sideshow performers that society labeled “freaks”—helped rescue the infants. Early newspaper reports said the incubator babies had died. The papers later corrected this: all six survived. But the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children seized on the incident to demand that premature infant care only be conducted in hospitals. The problem with their demand should be obvious by now: the hospitals still would not do it. Not for another 32 years. The people society called “freaks” saved the babies that the doctors refused to treat. I have thought about that sentence for weeks, and I still do not know what to do with it.

Couney kept going. He operated at Luna Park until 1943, when Cornell Hospital in New York finally opened the first dedicated premature infant station in the country. They used his methods; they used his technology. They did not credit him. He had tried to donate his incubators to the city of New York in 1940, but the city refused the donation. His last major exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair was a financial disaster. The exhibit cost a fortune to build, and attendance had declined. Premature babies in incubators were no longer novel enough to draw a crowd. He went broke. He died on March 1, 1950, in Coney Island, penniless and largely forgotten. He was approximately 80 years old. His wife had predeceased him by 14 years. His daughter, Hildegard, born six weeks premature in 1907 at just three pounds, had been treated in his own exhibit. She survived; she became a nurse; she worked alongside him for years. She never had children of her own. There are no direct descendants.

And that is where the official story ends: a quirky chapter in medical history, a fake doctor who saved real babies, an inspiring tale of one man against the system. Except I cannot stop looking at the system itself. A medical establishment that classified premature babies as “weaklings” and let them die. A eugenics movement that scored infants like cattle and lobbied to eliminate the “unfit.” A propaganda film urging audiences to “kill defectives, save the nation.” A network of trains shipping 200,000 children to strangers with numbered tags sewn into their clothes. And one unauthorized showman who saved 6,500 lives from the cracks between these institutions, funded by quarters from the same crowds who paid to see the four-legged woman and the lion-faced man.

The questions nobody asks are the ones that stay with me. Where did 8,000 premature babies come from during decades when hospitals did not even attempt to treat them? How did a man with no medical credentials operate for 40 years without a license in a system that was simultaneously sterilizing 64,000 people for being genetically unfit? Why did the institutions that had the technology to save these babies refuse to use it while hosting competitions to breed “better” ones in the next building over? And what kind of civilization puts living babies in glass boxes at a carnival? Not because it does not care, but because it is the only place that will.

I found one more detail while researching this. In the summer of 1934, Couney hosted a reunion at Coney Island for the babies he had treated at the Chicago World’s Fair the previous year. Of the 58 infants he had cared for, 41 came back—grown, healthy, carried in their mothers’ arms. Photographers were there. The New York Times covered it. And somewhere in the same newspaper that week, you could find articles about eugenics, about the fitness of the American gene pool, and about which humans were worth preserving. The babies in the photos did not know any of that. They just knew they were alive and that a man whose real name nobody knew had decided they were worth saving when nobody else would.

The buildings where he worked are gone. The incubators were scrapped. The records are incomplete. But the questions persist, and they connect to something larger than one man and his sideshow. What happened to the children nobody counted? What system decided which ones lived and which ones disappeared? And what are we still not being told about the decades when babies were currency, classified as “defective” or “fit,” shipped by train or displayed in glass, scored like livestock or left to die, depending on which building you walked into at the fair?

This history is a stark, uncomfortable tapestry woven from the threads of institutional apathy and radical empathy. When we examine the turn of the century, we often look through a lens of progress—the rise of industry, the expansion of cities, and the advancement of science. Yet, in the shadows of this progress, a profound moral crisis was brewing. The juxtaposition of Martin Couney’s makeshift NICUs with the widespread, state-sanctioned eugenics movement is not just a historical anomaly; it is a profound indictment of a society that had the capability to preserve life but lacked the collective will to do so universally.

Consider the atmosphere of the American world’s fairs. These events were designed to be grand advertisements for the future. They showcased electric lights, new machines, and the ingenuity of the modern mind. Yet, at the heart of these festivals of progress were the eugenics exhibits. Families would walk through halls filled with charts and models suggesting that human life could be optimized—that traits could be selected, filtered, and perfected. It is chilling to think that a parent could walk out of a “Better Babies” judging booth, having had their healthy child ranked by a panel, and pass right by an incubator station where tiny lives were clinging to existence only because a private showman saw their value. The society that cheered for “perfect” children was the very same society that declared “imperfect” ones disposable.

The fact that the medical establishment actively resisted Couney’s methods speaks volumes about the rigidity of their professional morality at the time. They viewed the “weaklings” not as patients to be nurtured, but as biological errors that were destined to expire. By labeling them as such, they absolved themselves of the duty to care. It allowed the state to pivot from healthcare to social control, leading to the sterilization programs that marked millions for exclusion from the human community. In this climate, Couney’s presence was a radical act of civil disobedience, though he likely saw it only as business. He operated within the logic of the carnival because the logic of the clinic was closed to him.

Then there is the haunting legacy of the orphan trains. The displacement of a quarter-million children suggests a country that treated human life as a commodity, subject to redistribution, tagging, and relocation on a massive, impersonal scale. The lack of records and the sheer secrecy surrounding these thousands of lives mirrors the way premature babies were treated: they were subjects in an experiment they did not consent to, moving through systems that prioritized expediency over individual dignity. We see this same objectification in the strange, widespread cultural imagery of babies as agricultural products—the cabbage patch cards and the “harvesting” of infants. It reflects an era that struggled to reconcile the biological reality of human birth with an industrial worldview that viewed everything—including the next generation—as an output of a production line.

The fire at Dreamland in 1911 serves as a symbolic turning point. In that moment of crisis, the professional medical elite stood by while the so-called “freaks”—the marginalized outcasts of society—rushed into the smoke. It is a powerful subversion of societal roles. The people who were displayed as spectacles were the ones who acted with the most humanity. They saved the children because they knew what it was like to be judged, marginalized, and excluded. Their empathy was born from their own struggle, a counter-narrative to the cold, analytical “fitness” tests being conducted by the scientific establishment elsewhere.

When we look back at these decades, we are forced to confront the fluidity of the term “humanity.” The definition of who was worthy of protection was constantly shifting, dictated by the architecture of the fairgrounds and the shifting whims of public policy. We think of civilization as a straight line upward, but this history shows us that it is more of a jagged, overlapping landscape. There were rooms where children were being measured for their perfection and rooms where they were being left to perish, while in a tent on the midway, life was being sustained by a man whose own identity was as fragile as the babies in his care.

Perhaps the most haunting aspect of this story is the silence that followed. The fact that the hospitals eventually adopted Couney’s technology without acknowledging his role is a final act of erasure. The system corrected itself, but it did so by burying the history of the man who had exposed its initial cruelty. By sanitizing the history of neonatal care, we have forgotten that it was born in a sideshow. We have forgotten that for a long time, the survival of the most vulnerable was not a right, but a luxury provided by an unlicensed, enigmatic figure in a costume.

What does it mean for us today, in 2026, to remember this? It means we must be vigilant about the systems we build and the labels we use. When we categorize human beings as “fit” or “unfit,” “productive” or “non-productive,” “valuable” or “disposable,” we are walking in the footsteps of those who judged babies like cattle. The history of Couney and the premature infants he saved is a testament to the fact that when institutions fail to provide care, it is often the most unlikely, unconventional individuals who step in to hold the line. It asks us to look at the cracks in our own society—at the children, the marginalized, and the vulnerable—and to question who is counting them, who is protecting them, and who is deciding if they are “worth saving.”

The records are incomplete, and the buildings have long since been torn down. The roller coasters of Coney Island have been replaced, and the world’s fairs have faded into memory. Yet, the moral dilemma remains as sharp as ever. We are still a civilization that struggles to value life for its own sake, rather than for its utility, its genetic potential, or its compliance with current societal standards. We are still, in many ways, standing in those fairgrounds, choosing which exhibit to visit and which lives to deem worthy of our time, our money, and our empathy.

The legacy of the 6,500 children who survived the incubators is a quiet one. They grew up, had families, and lived lives that were almost entirely defined by the fact that they were once considered “weak.” They are proof that the systems we trust to protect us are often wrong, and that the individuals we dismiss as outsiders often hold the greatest wisdom. Their survival was an affront to a culture that had decided they were better off gone. Every one of those 41 adults who returned for that 1934 reunion was a living, breathing rejection of the eugenics logic that was sweeping the nation. They were the outliers, the errors, the “weaklings” who dared to grow into adults and bear witness to a miracle that nobody else wanted to see.

We continue to struggle with these questions today. We have more technology than ever, more sophisticated hospitals, and more advanced scientific knowledge. Yet, the underlying question of worth remains the most pressing one we face. Are we, as a society, any better at recognizing the inherent value of life, regardless of its condition? Or are we still looking for our own versions of “better babies,” still trying to engineer our way into a society that only recognizes the strong? The story of Martin Couney is not just a historical curiosity. It is a mirror. It forces us to ask what we would do if the systems we rely on failed, and if the only place left to save a life was in the middle of a carnival, surrounded by a crowd that looked at the vulnerable as nothing more than a show.

Ultimately, the most important lesson from this era is that the most dangerous thing a society can do is to declare a group of people “unnecessary.” Once that line is crossed, the machines of state and science are used to justify the elimination of those people. Couney’s work was the opposite of this; it was a stubborn, persistent affirmation that even the smallest, weakest, and most “defective” among us deserve a chance to live. He may have been a showman, a liar, and an imposter, but in a world that was busy perfecting the “fit,” he was one of the few who was willing to bet on the “unfit.” That, perhaps, is the most human thing of all.

As we move forward, we should carry these stories with us. We should remember the numbered tags sewn into the clothes of children on the orphan trains, the medals pinned to the chests of “perfect” babies at state fairs, and the tiny, shriveled bodies resting in the glass boxes at Luna Park. We should remember that history is not just a series of dates and events; it is a series of choices—choices about who matters, who is protected, and who is left behind. And we should remember that whenever the institutions turn their backs on the vulnerable, there will always be someone—an outsider, a rebel, or an eccentric—who will find a way to offer a hand, even if it has to be done in the middle of a sideshow.

The ghosts of these decades still walk among us in the form of our societal debates, our medical ethics, and our persistent, nagging fears about the future of our species. The “weaklings,” the “defectives,” and the “unfit” are still here, and they are still waiting to see if we have learned the lesson of the incubator. Will we build a world that is inclusive and protective, or will we continue to host the same old competitions, searching for a perfection that can never exist? The answer to that question is written not in the records of the past, but in the way we treat the most vulnerable among us today. And it is a test we are taking every single day, whether we realize it or not.

In the end, maybe that is why I cannot stop looking at the photograph. The baby in the glass box is not just a relic of 1903. It is a symbol of our own fragility, our own vulnerability, and our own moral responsibility. That baby was alive because one man decided that its life was worth the cost of a 25-cent ticket. It was a bargain, a spectacle, and a profound act of defiance all at once. And it challenges each of us to ask: what is the cost of saving a life today, and are we willing to pay it, even when the rest of the world tells us it is not worth the effort? The story of Couney’s incubators is a story that never really ended; it is a story that is still being written, in every hospital, in every home, and in the heart of every society that has to decide whether to look away or to step into the tent and offer a hand.