The Last Coney Island Nurse Who Worked Dr. Couney's Incubators — Where the Babies Went

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]In 1943 on the boardwalk at Coney Island, a sign in painted letters read, "All the world loves a baby."

[00:00:08]Behind that sign, behind the ticket booth and the carnival music and the smell of fried clams, were rows of glass and steel boxes humming with warm air.

[00:00:18]Inside each box was a baby. A baby so small that doctors at every major hospital in New York had already written it off as a hopeless case.

[00:00:28]25 cents bought you a look, and the man taking your quarter, a small mustache doctor in a tailored white coat, was not a doctor.

[00:00:37]Not in the way you might think. He had no medical license that anyone could ever find. He had no hospital privileges. He had no university post.

[00:00:46]But for nearly 40 years, while the most respected medical institutions in America turned their backs on premature infants and let them die in back wards, this carnival sideshow saved nearly 7,000 of them.

[00:00:59]The hospitals refused the technology. He bought it from Europe with his own money. The hospitals refused the babies.

[00:01:06]He took them in by the train load. The hospitals refused to charge the families a single cent for incubator care that did not exist anywhere else in the country, and neither did he.

[00:01:16]Every quarter from every gawking tourist on that boardwalk paid for the milk, the heat, the oxygen, the round-the-clock nursing care. The parents paid nothing.

[00:01:27]And the woman who is about to speak to you, the last living nurse who worked those on Coney Island, sat at his bedside the night he died in 1950. She kept her uniform. She kept her notes.

[00:01:39]And for 76 years, she kept quiet about what happened to the babies once the hospitals finally figured out that the carnival doctor had been right all along and the carnival had to go.

[00:01:50]If you find stories like this one, the ones that never made it into the textbooks, the kind of history that gets quietly buried because it makes the respectable institutions look foolish, then take a moment right now to subscribe to the channel and tap the like button. It costs you nothing and it tells the algorithm to keep bringing these forgotten stories to people who actually want to hear them.

[00:02:12]Thank you.

[00:02:13]Now, let us begin. Her name, for the purposes of this account, is Hildegard.

[00:02:18]She was born in 1899 in a tenement in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, the daughter of a German baker and a Bohemian seamstress.

[00:02:27]And she came of age in a New York where one in 10 babies did not live to see their first birthday.

[00:02:33]That number, one in 10, is not a metaphor.

[00:02:36]It is a recorded statistic from the New York City Department of Health for the year 1900.

[00:02:43]If you were born premature, meaning before 37 weeks, your chances were considerably worse than that.

[00:02:50]The official medical opinion printed in the textbooks of the time and repeated in every teaching hospital from Bellevue to Johns Hopkins, was that premature babies were what they called weaklings.

[00:03:02]The word was used clinically.

[00:03:04]Weaklings.

[00:03:06]The reasoning, if you can call it that, was that nature had attempted to discard these infants and that the kindest course of action was to allow nature to complete its work.

[00:03:17]They were placed on a shelf, sometimes literally a shelf, wrapped in cotton and left to die.

[00:03:24]Mothers were told to forget them.

[00:03:26]Fathers were told to plan another child.

[00:03:30]And in the basement morgues of the great American hospitals, the small bodies were quietly carried out the back.

[00:03:36]Hildegard remembered her own mother whispering about a cousin in the next building over, a tiny boy born 2 months early in 1904, whose family had been told there was nothing to do but pray.

[00:03:49]The family had paid for a small wooden coffin in advance because the undertaker would not extend credit for what he called certainties.

[00:03:58]The boy was 3 lb at birth.

[00:04:01]He should have been dead by morning.

[00:04:03]Instead, a neighbor who worked as a barker for the amusement park out at Coney Island told the family there was a doctor on the boardwalk who took babies like that.

[00:04:12]No charge.

[00:04:13]The family wrapped the infant in a wool shawl, carried him onto the streetcar, transferred to the elevated railway, and rode for over an hour out to the seaside.

[00:04:23]They walked the boardwalk past the wooden roller coasters and the freak shows and the bathing pavilions until they came to a building with a white facade and large glass windows. And above the door in gold lettering, the words infantorium.

[00:04:38]The doctor was waiting.

[00:04:40]He weighed the boy on a small brass scale.

[00:04:43]He spoke a few quiet words in German to the mother.

[00:04:47]He took the infant from her arms with the practiced gentleness of someone who had done this thousands of times.

[00:04:53]And then, in front of the parents, he placed the boy into a contraption that looked like a glass coffin made warm.

[00:05:00]That cousin lived to be 71 years old.

[00:05:03]He died in the spring of 1975 in a hospital in Queens with three children of his own and seven grandchildren at his bedside.

[00:05:12]Hildegard attended the funeral. She was by then an old woman herself, retired, widowed, and she stood at the back of the church listening to the eulogy and thought to herself, "None of these people in this room, including the priest, know why this man got to grow old."

[00:05:28]The doctor on the boardwalk called himself Martin Couney.

[00:05:32]We will use that name because it is the name that history has settled on, although the records suggest he may have arrived in the United States under a slightly different one. And there is good reason to believe that the medical credentials he occasionally claimed from European universities were fictional.

[00:05:50]None of that matters for what he actually did.

[00:05:53]What he actually did was this.

[00:05:56]In the 1880s in Paris, a French obstetrician named Stéphane Tarnier had visited the zoo.

[00:06:03]At the zoo, he had seen incubators being used to hatch chicken eggs and to keep newborn chicks alive in the cold months.

[00:06:11]Tarnier, who had spent his career watching premature babies die at the Maternité Hospital in Paris, had the kind of insight that seems obvious in hindsight and was scandalous at the time.

[00:06:23]If a warm box could keep a chick alive, perhaps a warm box could keep a baby alive.

[00:06:29]He hired the zookeeper, a man named Odile Martin, to design a larger version for human infants. The result was a wooden cabinet lined with metal, heated by a flask of warm water below the floor of the chamber, ventilated by careful openings, and fitted with a glass top through which the infant could be observed.

[00:06:50]Tarnier began using these at the Maternité.

[00:06:53]The mortality rate for premature babies at his hospital dropped in the first year by nearly 30%.

[00:07:01]Within a decade, the rate had dropped by more than half.

[00:07:04]He had stumbled, half by accident, onto one of the most consequential medical innovations of the 19th century.

[00:07:12]And the American medical establishment wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

[00:07:17]The reasons for that refusal are where this story begins to look less like a quaint medical curiosity and more like what it really is, which is a case study in how institutional economics quietly decides who lives and who dies.

[00:07:32]The incubators were expensive. A single unit manufactured in France or in Germany and shipped to the United States cost roughly the equivalent of $2,000 in 1896, money which in today's purchasing power would be somewhere between 60 and 70,000 dollars.

[00:07:51]A ward of 20 incubators, the minimum needed to make any real impact on the prematurity death rate in a city the size of New York, would have cost a hospital well over a million dollars in today's money in equipment alone before you even hired the round-the-clock nursing staff required to operate them.

[00:08:10]The babies themselves did not pay.

[00:08:13]Premature birth, then as now, struck disproportionately at poor families, immigrant families, families in the crowded tenements with insufficient nutrition, with mothers who had worked through their pregnancies in garment factories breathing lint, who could not afford even the most basic prenatal care.

[00:08:32]These families had no money for hospital bills. The babies, if they lived, would require 6 to 12 weeks of incubator care before they could be safely discharged.

[00:08:43]The cost per infant, properly accounted, ran into the equivalent of tens of thousands of today's dollars.

[00:08:49]And the babies, if they survived, would mostly grow up to become factory workers and laundresses, and longshoremen, not patrons of the hospital endowment fund.

[00:09:00]The arithmetic, as the hospital board saw it, did not work. Charity wards already operated at a loss. Adding a prematurity ward with its specialized equipment and its specialized labor would have multiplied that loss tenfold.

[00:09:14]And so the boards of the great American teaching hospitals, in board meeting after board meeting through the 1890s and the early 1900s, voted not to install the incubators.

[00:09:27]The justification, when one was offered in public, was almost always medical.

[00:09:33]The technology was unproven. The babies, even if saved, would be sickly.

[00:09:39]The intervention violated natural selection.

[00:09:42]The truth, though recorded in the meeting minutes of more than one hospital that has since had the awkwardness of those minutes pointed out, was financial.

[00:09:51]The babies could not pay. The technology was too expensive. The math did not close.

[00:09:57]Coney saw the math differently. He had encountered the incubators in Europe, possibly as a young assistant to a doctor named Pierre Budin, who was Tarnier's protege, and possibly through other channels that are now lost to us.

[00:10:10]What he understood, and what no one else in America had yet understood, was that the funding model was the problem, not the technology.

[00:10:18]If the parents could not pay, and the hospitals would not pay, and the state would not pay, then someone else had to pay.

[00:10:25]And the someone else, Coney decided, would be the paying public.

[00:10:29]The American public in 1896 was hungry for spectacle.

[00:10:33]The traveling exposition, the world's fair, the dime museum, the seaside amusement park, these were the dominant entertainments of the age. People paid good money to see the strange, the marvelous, the not yet seen.

[00:10:47]And what could be stranger or more marvelous than a row of human babies smaller than a man's hand sleeping under glass in warm boxes, kept alive by science when nature had condemned them?

[00:10:59]Coney first exhibited his incubators at the Berlin Industrial Exposition in 1896.

[00:11:06]The exhibit was a sensation. He moved on to London, then to Paris. Then in 1903, he brought the operation to the boardwalk at Coney Island, where he would remain in one location or another for the next 37 years.

[00:11:21]The arrangement that Coney built on that boardwalk has no real parallel in the history of American medicine.

[00:11:27]The building he occupied, in its final incarnation at the corner of Surf Avenue and West 10th Street was a two-story structure with a white facade meant to evoke a hospital.

[00:11:38]Inside, on the ground floor, were the incubators arranged in two long rows facing inward with a railing separating them from the public walkway.

[00:11:48]Visitors paid 25 cents at the door. A uniformed nurse at the entrance in a starched white apron and a stiff cap would lead each group of visitors past the boxes.

[00:11:59]The babies were each in their own incubator, naked except for a small diaper, with a card on the front of the box listing the baby's first name only, the date of admission, the birth weight, the current weight, and the gestational age at birth.

[00:12:14]Some of the cards listed birth weights of 1 lb 12 oz, 1 lb 8 oz, 1 lb 4 oz. These were weights that, in any hospital in America at that time, would have been considered automatic death sentences.

[00:12:28]On the boardwalk, they were considered admissions. The nursing staff was the operation.

[00:12:34]Couney hired women, mostly young women, mostly the daughters of immigrants, mostly women who had trained as nurses but who, for one reason or another, had not found permanent placement in a hospital.

[00:12:46]The pay was good, better than hospital pay. The hours were long. The work was demanding in a way that hospital nursing simply was not.

[00:12:56]A nurse on the floor of Couney's facility was responsible for between three and five babies, which was a staffing ratio that no maternity ward in America came anywhere near.

[00:13:07]She fed them often by a small dropper of breast milk pumped from their own mothers and delivered to the facility by street car or, when the mother could not provide, by milk from a small group of paid wet nurses Couney kept on a separate floor of the building. She bathed them. She weighed them twice a day on a brass scale that recorded the weight to the eighth of an ounce.

[00:13:28]She turned them. She adjusted the heat of the incubator, which was controlled by a thermostat connected to a coil of warm water pipes running through the bottom of each box. She watched around the clock for the signs that the doctors of that era had no instruments to detect and only experience could read.

[00:13:47]The slight blueing at the lips, the shallow breath, the faint tremor of the small hands.

[00:13:52]And when a baby took a turn, the nurse called the doctor.

[00:13:55]And the doctor, who lived in a small apartment on the upper floor of the same building, came down within minutes, day or night.

[00:14:03]Hildegard was hired in the spring of 1922.

[00:14:07]She was 23 years old. She had completed her training at a small nursing school attached to a Lutheran hospital in Upper Manhattan.

[00:14:15]She had applied for positions at four city hospitals and had been turned away from all four for reasons that, in her recollection of it many decades later, came down to a quiet preference among the hospital matrons for nurses of older American stock and not the daughters of recent immigrants. She had seen an advertisement in a German-language newspaper.

[00:14:37]The advertisement said only nursing position, infant care, Coney Island, room and board provided, references required.

[00:14:48]She took the elevated railway out to the seaside on a Tuesday morning in April.

[00:14:53]She was interviewed by Couney himself in his office on the second floor of the facility.

[00:14:59]The office had a desk, a bookshelf of medical texts in three languages, a window overlooking the boardwalk, and a small framed photograph on the wall of a young girl, perhaps six or seven years old, whom Hildegard would later learn was Couney's own daughter, who had herself been born premature and had been raised in one of the incubators on display.

[00:15:23]Couney asked her three questions.

[00:15:25]He asked whether she could speak German, which she could.

[00:15:29]He asked whether she had any objection to working on a boardwalk amusement strips surrounded by carnival barkers and freak shows and bathing crowds, which she did not.

[00:15:39]And he asked whether she understood that the babies on the floor were not exhibits, but patients, and that any nurse who treated them as exhibits would be dismissed the same day.

[00:15:49]She said she understood.

[00:15:51]He told her the position was hers.

[00:15:54]He told her the pay was $18 a week, which was nearly double what the city hospitals were offering for first-year nurses.

[00:16:01]He told her she would live in a small dormitory on the upper floor of the building, shared with three other nurses, with meals included.

[00:16:09]And he told her finally that the day she was hired, she became responsible for the lives of four infants who, on every other accounting in the city of New York, were already supposed to be dead.

[00:16:22]She started the following Monday. The pattern of life on that floor, Hildegard would later say, was one of the most peculiar things she had ever experienced.

[00:16:33]On one side of a thin plate glass window, summer crowds in straw boaters and bathing costumes shuffled past, eating cotton candy, laughing, pointing at the babies, sometimes weeping openly at the sight of an infant the size of a kitten breathing under a glass dome.

[00:16:49]On the other side of that glass, the work of saving a life was happening in absolute medical seriousness.

[00:16:56]The nurses did not interact with the public. They wore their uniforms. They moved between the incubators. They recorded measurements on small charts mounted to the side of each box.

[00:17:06]They fed and bathed and turned the babies on a schedule that ran around the clock in three shifts.

[00:17:11]Couney himself moved among them, listening to lungs with a stethoscope, adjusting incubator temperatures, occasionally lifting a baby into his own arms and walking with it the length of the floor while he spoke quietly to it in German, which was the language he had been raised in and which he had told Hildegard once he believed the babies could hear even at 1 lb 4 oz and even with their eyes still fused shut.

[00:17:37]The money came in by the quarter.

[00:17:40]A busy summer Saturday, Hildegard recalled, might bring 15,000 paying visitors past the incubators.

[00:17:48]$3,750 in a single day in the dollars of 1923, which adjusted for purchasing power is something on the order of $70,000 in current value.

[00:18:00]The winters were leaner. The boardwalk closed down. The amusements shut.

[00:18:06]Coney kept the facility running on his own savings and on a small reserve he had built up over the previous summers.

[00:18:13]And the babies who happened to be in his care during the winter months were nursed by a skeleton staff and supported entirely out of his pocket.

[00:18:21]He never, in the 37 years he ran the operation, charged a parent a single cent for the care of a baby. Not 1 cent.

[00:18:28]The parents brought the infants, the carnival paid the bills. The babies who had been written off by every hospital in the city went home alive.

[00:18:38]Hildegard kept a small leather notebook in which she recorded, in her own hand, the names and birth weights and outcomes of every baby on her watch over the 18 years she worked at the facility.

[00:18:50]The notebook still exists. It runs to 240 pages. The columns are precise. Date of admission, gestational age, birth weight, weight at discharge, age at discharge, and a final column marked simply outcome.

[00:19:05]The vast majority of entries in that final column read home.

[00:19:09]A A number read deceased. And beside those entries Hildegard had drawn in pencil a small cross.

[00:19:17]The ratio of home entries to crosses over the 18 years she kept the notebook was approximately six to one.

[00:19:24]Six babies discharged for every baby lost.

[00:19:28]The comparable ratio at New York Hospital, at Bellevue, at any teaching institution in the city was the opposite.

[00:19:36]Five lost for everyone saved.

[00:19:39]And those numbers were considered in the medical journals of the time to be acceptable.

[00:19:45]For roughly three decades this arrangement persisted, and the medical establishment in New York and across the country found ways to ignore it.

[00:19:54]The mainstream journals did not publish about Cooney. The teaching hospitals did not send residents to study his methods, although a small number of younger doctors began quietly to visit the boardwalk in plain clothes on their days off to see for themselves what was being done.

[00:20:11]The professional bodies did not credential him, did not endorse him, did not publicly criticize him either.

[00:20:18]He existed, as far as American medicine was concerned, in a kind of polite official silence.

[00:20:24]The newspapers loved him. The medical journals pretended he was not there.

[00:20:29]And the babies, year after year, walked out of his facility in the arms of their mothers alive. The shift, when it finally came, was not driven by science. The science had been settled in Europe at least since the 1890s.

[00:20:43]The shift was driven by money, by liability, and by a slow generational changeover within the hospitals themselves.

[00:20:50]In the late 1920s and through the 1930s, a small group of American pediatricians who had been quietly influenced by what they had seen on the boardwalk began to argue in their own journals for the establishment of premature infant wards in major hospitals.

[00:21:08]The first such ward in the United States opened at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago in 1923, more than two decades after Cooney had begun operating publicly.

[00:21:19]Even then, the wards were small, underfunded, and stigmatized.

[00:21:23]It took another 15 years before a major New York hospital, Cornell, opened what could honestly be called a premature infant unit.

[00:21:32]By the 1940s, hospital-based premature care was beginning to be accepted as standard practice.

[00:21:39]And the Boardwalk operation, which had pioneered every technique that the hospital units were now adopting, began by the same institutional logic that had once excluded it to be quietly defined as obsolete.

[00:21:52]In 1943, the year of the great heat wave, Cooney closed the Coney Island facility.

[00:21:58]He was 73 years old. He had been operating the exhibit in one form or another for 47 years.

[00:22:05]He had saved, by his own careful count and by the corroborating count of Hildegard's notebook and the notebooks of the other long-serving nurses, somewhere between 6,500 and 7,000 premature infants.

[00:22:19]He stood at the entrance of the building on the last day of operation and shook the hand of every nurse on staff as she left. And he gave each of them an envelope with a final week's pay and a small handwritten note thanking her for her service.

[00:22:33]Hildegard kept her envelope. She kept the note. She kept her uniform folded in tissue paper in a cedar chest in the bedroom of her apartment in Queens for the next 63 years. And she kept her notebook, which she would not show to anyone, not even to her husband, until 1994, when a young historian from a university press called her on the telephone and asked in a voice that suggested he expected to be hung up on, whether by any chance she had ever worked for a man named Cooney.

[00:23:02]She told the historian in a series of conversations that took place over the following 2 years in the living room of her Queens apartment what had happened to the babies. Not the ones who had lived.

[00:23:13]Those for the most part had grown up into ordinary lives, had become ordinary New Yorkers, had married and worked and raised children of their own. Most of them entirely unaware that their first weeks of life had been spent on display behind glass on a carnival boardwalk.

[00:23:30]Some of them, when they learned the truth later in life, traveled out to Coney Island and stood on the spot where the facility had been and tried to imagine the place. Some never learned.

[00:23:39]Their parents had not told them.

[00:23:41]Their birth certificates listed only a private physician as the attending.

[00:23:46]The records, such as they were, had been kept in Cooney's own hand, in his own private files. And after his death in 1950, those files had gone, by his explicit instructions in his will, into the furnace of the building's coal cellar.

[00:24:01]He had not wanted, Hildegard explained, for any of the babies he had saved to ever be marked in any public record as having been carnival babies.

[00:24:10]He had not wanted the stigma to follow them.

[00:24:13]He had taken the names with him.

[00:24:15]But there was the other matter, the harder matter, the matter that Hildegard had been carrying for half a century and had told no one. When the hospitals finally opened their premature wards in the 1930s and the 1940s, the babies be- gan slowly at first and then more steadily to be diverted away from the boardwalk and into the hospital units.

[00:24:37]This was, on the surface, a good thing.

[00:24:39]The hospitals were free by then for charity cases.

[00:24:43]The technology was the same technology.

[00:24:45]The nursing was, in theory, the same nursing.

[00:24:49]But the hospitals, Hildegard explained, did not take all the babies.

[00:24:53]They took the ones likeliest to live.

[00:24:56]They took the larger ones, the older ones at birth, the ones whose mothers had been able to afford some measure of prenatal care, the ones whose families could be counted on to follow up with outpatient visits. The smaller ones, the ones at 1 lb 8 oz, the ones born to mothers on relief in the depths of the depression, the ones born to immigrant families with no English, the ones born to unmarried mothers, those continued to be referred to County.

[00:25:23]The hospitals took the survivable cases.

[00:25:26]County was sent the hopeless ones.

[00:25:28]And his survival rate, which had once been 6 to 1, began to slip. Not because his methods had failed, but because the hospitals had quietly redefined his role.

[00:25:38]He had been allowed, in the final years, to operate as the unpaid charity backstop for the cases the hospitals did not want to count against their own statistics.

[00:25:49]The babies who died at the boardwalk did not appear in hospital mortality tables.

[00:25:54]The babies who lived at the hospitals were credited to the hospitals.

[00:25:58]The economics, which had once condemned the technology, had now, with the technology accepted, condemned the man who had introduced it.

[00:26:07]Hildegard said that County understood this perfectly. He never complained. He continued in his final years to take every baby brought to his door, and he died in a small bed in his upstairs apartment in 1950, with a roll of unused incubator log cards on the table beside him, as though he had expected, even at the end, that another infant might be carried up the stairs at any moment. She was there. She held his hand. She closed his eyes.

[00:26:35]She walked downstairs and out onto the boardwalk, which by then had been dark for 7 years, and she stood for a long time in the cold January air, and looked at the empty windows where the incubators had once been.

[00:26:48]She was 51 years old. She lived another 56 years. She told the story in the end to a young historian on a tape recorder in her living room in Queens. And she said at the close of the final session that the thing she wanted people to understand was not that a carnival doctor had saved 7,000 babies, although he had.

[00:27:09]The thing she wanted people to understand was that the hospitals had known.

[00:27:13]They had known the entire time. They had simply done the math, and the math had told them to let the babies die. And a man with no medical license and a row of glass boxes on a boardwalk had done the math differently.

[00:27:26]That was the whole story. That was what she had been carrying.

[00:27:30]She thanked the historian for listening.

[00:27:32]She turned off the tape recorder, and she asked in a quiet voice whether he would mind seeing himself out because she was very tired now, and she would like to sit for a while with the window open and listen to the street.

[00:27:44]She died in 2006 at the age of 107.

[00:27:49]The notebook is now in a university archive.

[00:27:53]The uniform was given at her request to the small museum at Coney Island.

[00:27:58]And somewhere in this city, on this morning, an old man or an old woman is waking up in a bed who, 90-odd years ago, was carried out to the boardwalk in a wool shawl and laid into a glass box by a man with no license, and who has lived an entire life that the hospitals had already, on paper, ended.