Original in Spanish: El zoo de bebés prematuros
Last century there was a zoo of premature babies.
Seriously.
Martin A. Couney was born in 1869 in Germany. At 19 he emigrated to America, where he went around saying he couldn’t practice medicine because his degree wasn’t recognized there, but in truth he never finished the degree.
In those days premature little creatures had very poor odds of surviving.
In fact, I’d say it must even have felt slightly frowned upon to care “too much” for the ones born early or badly. It’s not that they threw disabled babies off a cliff like the Spartans, but in the end they would be a lifelong burden and child mortality was already enormous. People took those tadpoles home knowing they would soon be mourning a death, and that was that.
Incubators existed for the eggs of chicken farms, and someone else had already had the idea of using them to try to care for premature babies. It happens all the time: humans already have the technology, then flunk the implementation.
There were two main problems: every day of care cost a fortune, and you had to repeat it many times to learn how to care for them well.
Well, that Martin A. Couney solved both problems at once: he opened a free clinic where families with premature babies could bring them so his team would try to save them. In exchange, the babies would be part of a show for anyone willing to pay a ticket to see them.
A genius with his priorities straight.
From the start the guy made changes that made a lot of sense: air filters, ways of keeping the temperature stable, adjustments to how they were fed and cleaned… They gave hygiene great importance, partly thanks to his wife, who was one of the nurses at those clinics. He even forbade the wet nurses from smoking, in an era when nobody said smoking was bad for anyone.
If you were lucky, at some point in the show they would put a ring on some baby’s little arm to emphasize how tiny they were. That must have been the premium pass.
It was a smash hit. He started in New York and ended up opening franchises even in Europe.
Martin A. Couney saved more than 6000 tadpoles of the 8000 that went through his clinics. He got to saving 85% of babies who, without care, all died.
The past was rubbish. Blessed public healthcare.
Related: Martin Couney
(Facebook, 2025-09-26)