Baby love

I like Radio 4 — you can have it on in the background burbling away for hours and hours without taking in a word, and then there comes a moment when you’re making a cup of coffee and find yourself plunged into the story of how, during the first half of the 20th century, premature babies living in incubators were on display to the paying public at Coney Island amusement park. For instance.

Life Under Glass (Radio 4, Tuesday) was an intriguing little half-hour documentary, presented by Claire Prentice, about Dr Martin Couney, an American paediatrician who started off touring world fairs in the 1890s with his ‘infant hatchery’ and then from 1903 to 1943 established a sideshow exhibition at Coney Island, that ‘great whirlpool of joy…the world’s biggest barrel of fun!’ People would pay a quarter to peer in the glass-covered boxes at the world’s tiniest newborns. (The exhibition’s logo: ‘Everybody loves a baby!’)

The doctor made a lot of money and had a big house in New Jersey with a chandelier, his great-niece informed us — but it also appears that, at a time when most hospitals did not think it worth attempting to keep such premature babies alive,
85 per cent of Couney’s charges survived beyond infancy and he saved probably 6,500 or so lives.

We met some of those babies. Lucille Horne was born on 16 May 1920, weighing 2lbs, and her dad whisked her straight out of the hospital into a taxi cab to Coney Island. And here she still is, alive and lucid 96 years later.

Norma Johnson and her twin brother were born two months early when her mother fell off the kerb. She weighed 2lb 7oz, her brother 3lb. There was no incubator at the hospital and so the physician said, the only way they’re going to survive is to take them to Dr Couney.