A review by kdavis
The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies, by Dawn Raffel

4.0

I was a premie born 8 weeks early in the '70s. I had a whole team of doctors who saved me with the help of an incubator. If I had been born in the early 1900s, my parents might have carried me in a box to a Coney Island sideshow operated by Dr. Couney, because most doctors would have left me for dead. At a time when it was still an accepted practice to use whiskey as an anesthetic, Dr. Couney (who isn't an actual doctor) was saving 2-3 lb infants in his fairgrounds sideshow using an incubator set up that was on display for the public. In doing so, he also brought awareness to the fact that premies could actually be saved. During the course of his career, he had a survival rate of 6,800 out of nearly 9,000 premies, and many of his techniques are still in use today (not the drops of whiskey, though). As other reviewers mention, the timeline is almost nonexistent, which makes the story feel somewhat disjointed. However, the author did a nice job of juxtaposing Dr. Couney's story with the eugenics movement that was becoming a big deal at the time. I listened to this as an audiobook, but I might check out the book some time to see the pictures of the incubators.