The edgy young man with the hatbox wanted to see Dr. Couney—a personal matter, he said. The doctor assumed he had something to sell and sent him away. The man took his hatbox and left to spend hours wandering amid the dancing elephants, scenic railways, and carnival din of Coney Island. At last he reappeared; could Dr. Couney see him now? This time Couney said yes. The man opened the hatbox. Inside was a premature baby, tiny and red and struggling for breath.

Dr. Martin A. Couney knew just what to do; in fact, he knew more about “preemies” than anyone else in the United States. He was the first American to offer specialized treatment for them and could boast, toward the end of his career, that out of 8,000 in his care, 6,500 survived. “I can’t save all the babies,” he said, “but the percentage of loss is not large, and every parent knows I took good care of his baby until God took its soul. I never had a complaint or an investigation.”

This last was all the more impressive because—as the somewhat incongruous straw hat in the picture suggests—Couney was a showman. He paid for the wet nurses and the incubators that kept his premature babies alive by showing them to the public at twenty-five-cents-a-head admission on the boardwalk at Coney Island.

Couney was born either in Alsace or Breslau, in 1870. According to Dr. William Silverman, a California pediatrician who has been investigating Couney’s career ever since he read his obituary in 1950, he took his medical degree in Leipzig. By the 1890’s he was in Paris, studying the pathology of prematurely born babies under the great expert in the field, Pierre Budin.

Couney’s extremely rarefied sideshow was born when Budin asked him to supervise a display of incubators at the 1896 Berlin world’s fair. The nascent showman stirring within him, Couney inveigled six premature babies from the staff of the Berlin charity hospital, put them on display in the machines, and named his exhibit “Kinderbrutanstalt.” The “child hatchery” was a terrific success, and Couney, who had hoped only to clear expenses, found himself on the way to raising enough money to come to America.

In the summer of 1898 the doctor turned up at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha with a roomful of incubators and infants to show in them. Three years later, after a stint at the 1900 Paris Exposition, he was in Buffalo, New York, for the Pan-American Exposition. His success there is hinted at by the ecstatic metaphysics the exhibit wrung from the newspaperman Arthur Brisbane, who compared Niagara Falls and its tributary rivers with “the diminutive baby in its hot-air chamber, sightless, deaf, feeble—but with the great human race, the vast sea of organized thought back of it. … What is the power of the falls beside the force that may originate in the tiny brain