Nonfiction Navigators discussion

A wedding ring, comfortably fitted around the small arm of a premature infant, still living, relays a message to those looking onward: even the smallest of the small are worth saving because “everyone loves a baby.” In The Strange Case of Dr. Couney How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies by Dawn Raffel, the story of Dr. Martin Couney’s astonishing discovery that continues to positively shape the pediatric world into the twenty-first century: incubators, is told. Dr. Martin Couney used his discovery as a sideshow displayed with “living babies” at various world fairs around the United States along side bearded ladies and sword swallowers. With the high rate of infant mortality at the time, Dr. Couney discovered these incubators to help prematurely born infants stay alive along with the help from nurses including his wife. Raffel investigates Couney’s life and the events that lead up to his discovery of the “baby incubators” and tracks down some of the infants who were saved, most of them now in their nineties.

These premature babies saved by incubators, ladies with beards and sword swallowers, all seemingly morph into one as Dr. Couney’s story was retold, jumping back and forth between various settings and time frames. In The Strange Case of Dr. Couney How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies, details are blurred by supplementary information relating to the carnivals and world fairs at the time Dr. Couney made his discovery. At first, the book was portioned in a way that made sense to the reader, talking about the background of Dr. Couney and how his discoveries came about, but facts quickly became clouded by the additional information jumping from one person to another and from one time frame to another. The book, reading like a fiction novel, would have been brilliantly constructed if not for the author’s need to add in every minuscule detail, some unrelated, about Dr. Couney and his discovery. The information, however, is captivating and takes the mind back to the 1900’s, painting a picture of what it would have been like to see this exhibit at the time. Overall, the largely unknown story of Dr. Couney and his discovery is fascinating, but the choppy and jumpy way the book read is hard to comprehend and piece together. Raffel attempted to relay a clear story, but in the end the book came together in a way that was far from that.