More on Propaganda for Preemies

I am very jealous of Dawn Raffel for having written The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How A Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies. It’s a book and topic that has been in my head, hard drive and in a file of papers now on a bookshelf for about seventeen years.
After my son was born premature, I looked at a lot of books about premature babies and read about an Infantorium where the babies were hospitalized on Coney Island. Wait, what? Was my reaction and I immediately began searching online for any and all information on Dr. Couney. There was not much in 2002. I found Dr. William Silverman’s work from the 70’s and 80’s, a few scattered articles and little else.

I tried to find out more on the Doctor, his patients and ran into many dead ends. I did have a single email from one of his former patients which was great but did not lead to anything further. I spoke on the phone to one of the organizers of the Coney Island History Museum. He told me there was at least one person working on a book and when I asked if he had any idea where Dr. Couney’s papers were he said, “No, do you?”

While reading Ms. Raffel’s excellently researched book I saw that she had the same discoveries and dead ends that I did. Like her, I wanted to contact Dr. Silverman, but was unable to as he had died. But she had the ability to dig further, deeper and the talent to write it down beautifully. She was also unable to find his papers, and found out a lot more about his daughter than I was able to, with added speculation about her history. I always thought she was the key to a lot of his story, but most of that died with her.

Where I was able to find one of his former patients, Ms. Raffel was able to find several, and it led to a joyful reunion of some of them.

There is a great mystery to Dr. Martin Couney’s life, which is what compelled me to look into it for more than several hours a year over the past seventeen. It’s ability that I lacked in writing it down and Dawn Raffel has written a wonderful book that leaves a lot of questions open, but also provides many answers and unlocks more than a few doors about the profound life of a very enigmatic man.