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Thousands of premature infants were saved from certain death by being part of a Coney Island entertainment sideshow.

At the time premature babies were considered genetically inferior, and were simply left to fend for themselves and ultimately die.

Dr Martin Couney offered desperate parents a pioneering solution that was as expensive as it was experimental - and came up with a very unusual way of covering the costs.

It was Coney Island in the early 1900’s. Beyond the Four-Legged Woman, the sword swallowers, and “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” was an entirely different exhibit: rows of tiny, premature human babies living in glass incubators.

The brainchild of this exhibit was Dr. Martin Couney, an enigmatic figure in the history of medicine. Couney created and ran incubator-baby exhibits on the island from 1903 to the early 1940s.

Behind the gaudy facade, premature babies were fighting for their lives, attended by a team of medical professionals.To see them, punters paid 25 cents.The public funding paid for the expensive care, which cost about $15 a day in 1903 (the equivalent of $405 today) per incubator.

Couney was in the lifesaving business, and he took it seriously. The exhibit was immaculate. When new children arrived, dropped off by panicked parents who knew Couney could help them where hospitals could not, they were immediately bathed, rubbed with alcohol and swaddled tight, then “placed in an incubator kept at 96 or so degrees, depending on the patient. Every two hours, those who could suckle were carried upstairs on a tiny elevator and fed by breast by wet nurses who lived in the building. The rest [were fed by] a funneled spoon. The smallest baby Couney handled is reported to have weighed a pound and a half.

His nurses all wore starched white uniforms and the facility was always spotlessly clean.

An early advocate of breast feeding, if he caught his wet nurses smoking or drinking they were sacked on the spot. He even employed a cook to make healthy meals for them.

The incubators themselves were a medical miracle, 40 years ahead of what was being developed in America at that time.

Each incubator was made of steel and glass and stood on legs, about 5ft tall. A water boiler on the outside supplied hot water to a pipe running underneath a bed of mesh, upon which the baby slept.

Race, economic class, and social status were never factors in his decision to treat and Couney never charged the parents for the babies care.The names were always kept anonymous, and in later years the doctor would stage reunions of his “graduates.

According to historian Jeffrey Baker, Couney’s exhibits “offered a standard of technological care not matched in any hospital of the time.”

Throughout his decades of saving babies, Couney understood there were better options. He tried to sell, or even donate, his incubators to hospitals, but they didn’t want them. He even offered all his incubators to the city of New York in 1940, but was turned down.

In a career spanning nearly half a century he claimed to have saved nearly 6,500 babies with a success rate of 85 per cent, according to the Coney Island History

In 1943, Cornell New York Hospital opened the city’s first dedicated premature infant station. As more hospitals began to adopt incubators and his techniques, Couney closed the show at Coney Island. He said his work was done.

Today, one in 10 babies born in the United States is premature, but their chance of survival is vastly improved—thanks to Couney and the carnival babies.

https://nypost.com/2018/07/23/how-fake-docs-carnival-sideshow-brought-baby-incubators-to-main-stage/

Book: The strange case of Dr. Couney

New York Post Photograph: Beth Allen

Original FB post by Liz Watkins Barton

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the author's barely disguised longing for a kinder world

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Two sentence horror story (warning very scary 😰😱😨)

"I have a new hyperfixation!" I said happily.

(Three days later) sigh…pk;m new

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I'd care if the person I reblogged this from committed suicide.

Reblog this from anybody. literally. ANYBODY. even if you dont like them or even know them that well. YOU COULD SAVE THEIR LIFE.

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recently we were out on a hilltop taking photos of the comet and suddenly some car's headlights blind us from across the bay. literally four miles away.

who the fuck is out here with these nuclear fusion powered headlights. who puts naval searchlights on their fucking toyota tacoma.

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Music as a Switching Method

We have mostly voluntary switches, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Sometimes it's hard to stay in the front when the body really wants One Particular Guy to front for the next week straight. It has a habit of latching onto one person until they get worn out, then shoving another guy into front--rinse and repeat. No one likes it. It's not productive. Sure, we can switch, but we feel absolutely horrible and blurry if we do, if the brain decides it doesn't want whoever switched in.

But we've learned ways to make it easier for other people to hold onto the front using certain methods. One of the most effective ways to do it? Music. A lot of us have our own playlists, favourite songs and music tastes, and those get so associated with us that they're almost inseparable from us. Like our own list of theme songs that we have playing in the background when we're around. And what do you know, it grounds us and keeps us from blurring too hard.

Your identity gets so merged with your playlist that years after your last front, you can hear a song from it and be rocketed straight into the fronting area from wherever you were inside. Some people share songs across playlists and those don't tend to be as strong of a front trigger, but sometimes they lean more toward being a switch-in trigger for one person than anyone else. Sometimes it depends on the overall playlist vibe and takes a few songs in a row to summon someone from the headspace. Sometimes it's as simple as the first few notes of a favourite song.

It's almost literally like we have our own theme songs that follow us around like videogame characters. If the song plays, you know we're there or we'll be there soon. It definitely helps with times where our brain is being difficult. It means that sometimes switches happen out in public if we hear a certain song playing on some speaker somewhere, but that's better for us than not having any way to combat identity-blurring.

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Egg me was lied to. "Wanting to be a girl" wasn't trans, only "already knowing oneself to be a girl" was trans, and it only warranted transition if the suffering of having to live as a boy was unbearable. I merely had a wish, I could endure it not being fulfilled, and I acted in accordance with my boy upbringing, so I wasn't considered trans, or not trans enough to transition.

Yes I suspected I was trans at 14. Yes I did talk to my parents about it at 17. I'm not going to forgive them for making me rebury that until I was 28 and I finally met someone who didn't consider transition unthinkable unless as an alternative to death. In the meantime, I bought time by appeasing my need to live as my gender with little deniable bits of gender-affirming self expression, "egg things".

Child me did her level best. I've spent too many hours trying to figure out what she could've done better in the face of abuse and neglect and sexist healthcare and frankly genocidal legislation. How much earlier we could've realistically transitioned had we been "better" at making those decisions. 26. This world did not give me the agency to transition until age 26. I looked up from my repression and realised I now could and should at 28. Got on hormones age 30, the intervening two years swallowed by the depression that had become my default state of being.

We didn't fail. We were failed. Never blame yourself. Your eggshell lasted as long as was necessary to protect you from cisiety. Grieve the years lost, then live with a vengeance. Live to show your younger self what she was holding on for. Live as if your joy must burn down the system that kept you prisoner, because it will.

I’m not wet, I’m just covered in water!

As an egg, I once prayed to god to make me a girl. Just for a day, “to know what it was like.” I try to be compassionate towards myself for all those little egg things— poor girl was going through it. But it’s hard not to get frustrated with myself sometimes regardless for all the obvious, unheeded signs.

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there are many things that can be said about the power dynamics between medical provider and patient.

but the simplest is: which of you chose to be there?

which of you can leave freely without risk of being detained or physical danger, and which of you must stay or risk their health?

a doctor who does not want to be a doctor can become a mechanic or a researcher or a retail worker for all i care. a patient who does not want to be a patient can become dead.

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i think something that tme allies need to learn is the fact that you're going to end up doing transmisogyny. there are people i care about deeply who have been guilty of it. the point isn't that you never mess up, it's that you stop arguing with a trans women when they tell you to your face that you hurt her. it's telling her that you'll keep her safe when introducing her to your friends when she's scared. it's reminding her she's beautiful when you made her feel repulsive. it's making sure we never lose another one of our sisters before she gets to grow old ever again.

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bro LMFAOOOO

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poker is a hateful game that punishes people who wear their beautiful sensitive heart on their sleeve