Chapter 23
No world’s fair would be complete without a carnival that provided at least a little bit of freak show, and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition intended to be outdone by none. On the mile-long arcade stretch of the St. Louis fairgrounds called The Pike, fairgoers could play games, watch performers, and stroll past every manner of oddity, each more peculiar than the last. In fact, the idiom “coming down the pike” is said to have been coined at the fair, as visitors never knew what they would see next, from a giant bear sculpted of prunes to a live encampment of Pygmies flown in from Africa.
But sandwiched somewhere in-between a contortionist and Beautiful Jim Key the Educated Horse was perhaps the most peculiar exhibit of all: a long row of creatures encased in glass and steel containers. Crowds couldn’t help but stop and stare, as occupants of the box-like contraptions looked freakishly human, only smaller, and they moved just enough to seem alive.
Indeed they were alive—mostly—all premature infants borrowed from a local charity hospital. The babies, which were being tended by a team of nurses, had been loaned out to occupy newfangled incubators that inventors said could save their lives. It was such a serious medical advance that the display—run by the Imperial Concession Co.—was placed in the carnival rather than the science building, and visitors could gawk at the tiny infants struggling to breathe for the meager investment of 25 cents.
Today, such cavalier handling of desperately fragile newborns would land a lot of people in jail. But in 1904, infant mortality in general was spiking around 30 percent, and medical science was busy trying to figure out how to save more infants of normal birth weight. The mortality rate for premature births was closer to 98 percent, so in the eyes of most, these babies were as good as dead anyway.
The exhibit was modeled after similar stunts in Europe and the United States spearheaded by Martin Couney, a French doctor turned showman who first conceived the idea for the 1896 Berlin World’s Fair when he was put in charge of an incubator exhibit. Various iterations of incubators had been used in France for nearly three decades, but many doctors were skeptical about the benefits of the device. So to ratchet up attention, Couney talked his way into a half dozen premies from the Berlin Charity Hospital and set them up in a display at the fair that he creepily dubbed “Kinderbrutanstalt,” or child hatchery.
Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
A doctor, nurses, and wet nurses tended to the infants day and night, and gawkers by the tens of thousands streamed in for a glimpse at the spectacle. Spurred by the assertion that all of the Kinderbrutanstalt babies survived, public reaction to the incubator display was generally positive, and it wasn’t long before Couney took his macabre and enormously profitable sideshow on the road to other expos and even to a permanent display on Coney Island.
It also wasn’t long before competitors appeared, such as the group bankrolling the incubator display at the world’s fair in St. Louis. But while Couney was a physician, the Imperial Concession Co. was run by businessmen who lacked any medical acumen. So while the exhibit had the same style of incubators tended by nurses in starched smocks, it lacked certain sterility safeguards that the critically ill newborns needed.
As a result, about a month after the exposition opened, contagious diarrhea swept through the nursery, likely transferred from one infant to the next by wet nurses or a gawking public that came too close. Four months into the show, the infant mortality rate hovered near 50 percent, and the display was more like a horror show than a carnival curiosity.
It was only with the hire of St. Louis doctor John Zahorsky that the virulent bug was brought under control thanks to a redesign of air space and a rewriting of sterilization protocols. But for the press and the medical community, the damage was done. They denounced the attraction as barbaric and the incubators as little death boxes.
While it would take the medical community another 30 years to warm up to the idea of incubators, the public was more forgiving, and the popularity of Couney’s baby hatcheries at county fairs, world expos, and on Coney Island and other amusement parks intensified. In fact, until the 1930s, Couney’s sideshows were the primary treatment option for parents with premature babies, so he didn’t struggle to acquire them even as hospitals grew reluctant to hand them over.
Finally in the mid-1930s, doctors came around on incubators and decided maybe they had some medical merit. Around the same time, Couney’s audiences began to dwindle—apparently the public’s love affair with watching frail babies struggle to breathe was ending. Ever the showman, Couney broadcast the demise of his exhibit as a success, saying his goal to champion acceptance of the life-saving device had finally been accomplished. And though he’d been relegated to carnival row by his peers for decades, it seems that Couney was right. Doctors, many of whom had previously eschewed him as a quack, began consulting with him to develop their own kinderbrutanstalts, and that’s one thing they definitely didn’t see coming down the pike.