This is an IHeart podcast.

And we continue here on Our American Stories. Don Raffle was a fiction editor for many years.

Raffles's most recent book, The Strange Case of Dr. Cooney, how a mysterious European showman,

saved thousands of American babies. Let's take a listen to this wonderful, unique American story.

I spent about four years going down a rabbit hole of research to find out what was the deal

with one of the strangest stories in American medical history. So early in the 20th century,

if you were to go to Coney Island, the people's playground,

also known affectionately as Sodom by the Sea for its hijinks, or if you were to go to Atlantic City,

which at the time was America's honeymoon capital, or if you were to go to, say, a theme park

in Chicago or Minneapolis,

you would pass an exhibit that would say

infant incubators with real living babies,

and there would be a barker outside,

and you could pay a quarter to go see

living premature babies being cared for in incubators.

So when I first stumbled across this, I thought, how is this even possible? Is this the most

crazy exploitation of human life? Is this a commodification of babies? Well, it turned out to be even stranger than that.

There was almost no care for premature babies available in American hospitals at that time.

So if somebody had a baby and a tiny one, two or three pounds, their best hope was to take the baby

home and maybe wrap it in blankets, keep it warm next to the oven or the fire, and hope

for the best and often the best was not very good.

Along came this man, Dr. Martin Arthur Cooney, who was behind all of these side shows. Who was he? He claimed that he was a

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