About this item
The extraordinary tale of how a mysterious immigrant "doctor" became the revolutionary innovator of saving premature babies--by placing them in incubators in World's Fair side shows and on Coney Island and Atlantic City. What kind of doctor puts his patients on displayAs Dawn Raffel artfully recounts, Dr. Couney figured out he could use incubators and careful nursing to keep previously doomed infants alive, and at the same time make good money displaying these babies alongside sword swallowers, bearded ladies, and burlesque shows. How this turn-of-the-twentieth-century migr became the savior to families with premature infants, known then as "weaklings"--while ignoring the scorn of the medical establishment and fighting the climate of eugenics--is one of the most astounding stories of modern medicine. And as readers will find, Dr. Couney, for all his opportunistic entrepreneurial gusto, is a surprisingly appealing character, someone who genuinely cared for the well-being of his tiny patients. But he had something to hide.Drawing on historical documents, original reportage, and interviews with surviving patients, acclaimed journalist and magazine editor Dawn Raffel tells the marvelously eccentric story of Couney's mysterious carnival career, his larger-than-life personality, and his unprecedented success as the savior of tiny babies.
About the Author
Dawn Raffel's most recent book is The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, which was named by NPR as one of the great reads of 2018 and won a 2019 Christopher Award for books that "affirm the highest values of the human spirit." Her previous book, The Secret Life of Objects, was selected for Oprah's Summer Reading List, and reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "a lean, brilliant, playful memoir." She is also the author of two collections--Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division--and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Brooklyn Rail, The Quarterly, NOON, and many other periodicals and anthologies. Dawn is a freelance book editor in New York.
