ForgottenVolumes

Luna Babies: A Story of the Incubator Babies Exhibit at Luna Park, Coney Island In the years between 1898 and 1943, thousands of premature babies in America were given a choice most would never have been offered in hospitals: a chance to live inside glass incubators displayed in public amusement parks and world’s fairs. Babies born at one, two, or three pounds were often considered beyond help. American hospitals in the early 1900s had no neonatal intensive care units, limited incubator technology, and little structured care for extremely premature infants. Many families were told to go home and wait. Some were told their babies would not survive the day. Then something unexpected happened. From 1898 onward, incubator exhibits began appearing at major expositions across the United States, including Buffalo in 1901 and later Chicago and New York fairs. Crowds paid admission to walk past rows of glass enclosures where premature infants lay struggling to survive while nurses worked constantly to keep them alive. By 1903, the exhibits became a permanent fixture at Coney Island, first at Dreamland (1903–1911), and then at Luna Park (1911–1943/44). A parallel long-running installation also operated in Atlantic City from 1903 through the 1940s. The man behind it was Martin Couney, born Michael Cohen around 1869 in Krotoszyn, then part of Prussia (now Poland). A Jewish immigrant to the United States, he publicly claimed European medical training, but he had no verified medical degree. Despite this, he built and ran one of the most successful premature infant care systems of the era. Couney never charged the parents. Instead, the public paid. Admission fees of a few cents from amusement-park visitors funded incubators, nurses, equipment, and food for the babies. Crowds gathered outside glass walls to watch infants so small they could fit across a forearm, their skin thin enough that veins showed through, their bodies struggling to maintain heat and breath on their own. Inside the exhibit, nurses worked in shifts around the clock. They monitored temperature and breathing, changed tiny diapers, and fed the weakest infants through droppers or tubes. Wet nurses supplied breast milk, the only reliable nutrition available at the time. Every gram gained was recorded. Every setback could turn fatal. Many mothers were poor immigrant women from Eastern Europe, including large numbers of Jewish women who settled New York’s Lower East Side tenements. They worked long hours in the garment industry sewing piecework at home or in sweatshops and factories for low wages. These women faced exhausting physical labor, crowded and unsanitary housing, poor nutrition, and frequent difficult pregnancies that often resulted in premature birth. They were exhausted working mothers from legitimate tenement households. When hospitals turned them away, many traveled by streetcar or elevated train to Coney Island carrying their fragile infants, handing them over in desperation to the only place offering specialized care. Some mothers traveled for hours by streetcar or elevated train to reach Coney Island, carrying infants wrapped so small they could be hidden under a coat. Between 1898 and the early 1940s, more than 8,000 premature infants passed through Couney’s incubator programs. Approximately 6,500 survived. The incubator exhibits began in Europe with a demonstration in Berlin in 1896 before moving to the United States for temporary shows at major fairs, including Omaha in 1898, Buffalo in 1901, Chicago in 1933–1934, the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in San Francisco in 1939–1940, and other world’s fairs. Permanent operations were established at Coney Island in New York, first at Dreamland from 1904 until the park burned in 1911 and then at the long-running Luna Park site from 1903 until 1943 or 1945. A separate long-term exhibit also operated along the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey, from 1905 to 1943.

“Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press” by Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair (1998) This book lays out the CIA’s institutional role as protector and partner of drug traffickers from WWII to the crack epidemic while exposing the agency’s experiments on American civilians, including biological aerosol tests over cities and LSD dosing of unwitting citizens. It also details how the mainstream press repeatedly covered up or attacked the truth. The CIA’s drug complicity began in 1944 when its predecessors (OSS and Naval Intelligence) cut a deal with Lucky Luciano, America’s top gangster and heroin kingpin: in exchange for Mafia help invading Sicily and smashing communist unions on the docks, the U.S. let the heroin trade flourish. In the 1980s, the CIA shielded Nicaraguan Contra cocaine networks. A San Francisco Bay Area ring run by Norwin Meneses (a top Nicaraguan trafficker tied to the FDN Contra faction) and Danilo Blandón sold tons of cocaine to L.A.’s Crips and Bloods. Profits went to arm the CIA-backed Contras fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinistas. Later, CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz admitted under oath that the Agency maintained relationships with known drug dealers and had Reagan-era Justice Department clearance not to report their crimes. San Francisco geoengineering / biological “fog” tests (Operation Sea Spray): The book details how the U.S. government (with CIA-linked biological weapons programs) conducted open-air experiments on the public. In 1950, as part of a simulated biological warfare attack, the Navy sprayed massive quantities of the bacteria Serratia marcescens (and Bacillus subtilis) over San Francisco’s foggy skies in Operation Sea Spray. The bacteria were aerosolized from a ship offshore and drifted across the city for days, exposing roughly 800,000 residents including entire families and children to the agents. The fog-like dispersal was chosen precisely because San Francisco’s natural marine layer would carry the agents inland like a real enemy bio-weapon attack. The tests caused a spike in pneumonia-like illnesses; at least one man (Edward Nevin) died from a Serratia infection. The government denied responsibility for decades. Serratia tests continued into the 1960s. Cockburn and St. Clair tie this directly to the CIA’s importation of Nazi scientists (via Operation Paperclip/Overcast) straight from Dachau and Buchenwald labs. These ex-Nazi experts were put to work on U.S. chemical and biological weapons programs. These were not isolated the book describes them as part of systematic experiments on the public. The books details experiments exclusively on American children (such as dedicated child dosing programs), the mass bio-aerosol tests and drug-fueled epidemics it documents directly impacted children as part of the broader civilian populations and communities affected. • MKUltra and “Dr. Gottlieb’s House of Horrors”: Under Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA ran a massive mind-control program involving LSD, other hallucinogens, radiation, psychological torture, and biological agents on unwitting subjects. Press as active co-conspirator: The book exposes how major outlets (NYT, WaPo, LAT) coordinated attacks on reporters like Gary Webb, then helped destroy his career and reputation when he connected the Contras to the crack explosion. This media role in burying proven CIA-drug ties is framed as one of the dirtiest ongoing cover-ups. Cockburn and St. Clair document how the CIA’s drug alliances, biological spraying over American cities, Nazi scientist imports, mind-control experiments, and protection of war criminals were not aberrations they were core to Cold War operations, with full knowledge at the highest levels. What the public was told were wild “conspiracy theories” turned out to be documented policy. The public paid in addiction epidemics, mysterious illnesses, eroded trust, and destroyed lives. The book is fact-packed with names, dates, declassified admissions, and congressional testimony.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the release of over 400,000 declassified documents in December 2016 finally cracking open the state archives on the Yemenite Children Affair the most gut-wrenching medical violations in Israel’s early history were laid bare for the world to see. The most comprehensive recent English-language scholarly collection on the subject, The Yemenite Children Affair: Ethnic Tensions, Immigration, and Public Records in Israel (edited by Motti Inbari with key contributions from medical historians Dorit Weiss and Shifra Shvarts, Lexington Books, 2024), draws directly on those archives, hospital logs, and commission records to expose the horror without conspiracy theories. What it reveals is not baby theft rings, but a cascade of unauthorized autopsies, organ harvesting, and experimental procedures performed on dead and dying Yemenite infants acts that violated Jewish law, parental consent, and basic humanity. The specific organ-harvesting details are among the most horrific in the entire affair. Testimony and records examined in the book (and in the Knesset special committee that reviewed the declassified files) confirm that doctors routinely performed post-mortem examinations on deceased Yemenite babies and toddlers without any parental permission. These autopsies were conducted in violation of Jewish tradition, which demands the body remain intact for burial. In multiple documented cases, children’s hearts were surgically removed from the tiny corpses. Those hearts were then handed over to American researchers studying why Yemenite Jews exhibited an almost complete absence of heart disease. The organs were shipped abroad as research specimens while the rest of the bodies were hastily buried often in mass or unmarked graves without the parents ever seeing the child, receiving a proper death certificate, or being allowed to participate in the funeral. Parents many illiterate in Hebrew, non-native speakers, and already shattered by the deaths of their children amid the 1949–1954 immigration crisis were simply told “your baby died” and sent away. No explanation of the autopsy. No mention that their infant’s heart had been carved out and exported for foreign science. The book’s medical-historical analysis (especially Shvarts and Weiss’s chapters on policy and health challenges) places these acts in the context of a collapsing hospital system overwhelmed by Operation Magic Carpet immigrants, rampant disease, and a condescending attitude toward “primitive” Mizrahi families. But the archives show the procedures were real, systematic in their indifference, and devastating in their cultural desecration. Even before death, the violations were monstrous. The declassified records and the book detail clusters where severely malnourished Yemenite babies were injected with experimental protein solutions unproven, desperate treatments in a medicine-starved country. At least four of these infants died as a direct result of the injections. Sick children were ripped from their mothers’ arms, isolated in wards or Babies’ Homes where parents were forbidden to stay, and then subjected to these interventions without informed consent or follow-up. A mother might leave her child for “observation” only to return to an empty crib and a curt note. The Yemenite Children Affair does not flinch from these facts. It uses the Netanyahu-released documents to prove the negligence was criminal in scale: babies dying in filth from preventable disease, then being dissected, their hearts harvested for research, their bodies dumped without ceremony. The scholarship is unflinching precisely because it rejects organized kidnapping conspiracies (the archives contain zero evidence of systematic sales or adoptions) while refusing to whitewash the real atrocities committed against the most vulnerable.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the release of over 400,000 declassified documents in December 2016 finally cracking open the state archives on the Yemenite Children Affair the most gut-wrenching medical violations in Israel’s early history were laid bare for the world to see. The most comprehensive recent English-language scholarly collection on the subject, The Yemenite Children Affair: Ethnic Tensions, Immigration, and Public Records in Israel (edited by Motti Inbari with key contributions from medical historians Dorit Weiss and Shifra Shvarts, Lexington Books, 2024), draws directly on those archives, hospital logs, and commission records to expose the horror without conspiracy theories. What it reveals is not baby theft rings, but a cascade of unauthorized autopsies, organ harvesting, and experimental procedures performed on dead and dying Yemenite infants acts that violated Jewish law, parental consent, and basic humanity. The specific organ-harvesting details are among the most horrific in the entire affair. Testimony and records examined in the book (and in the Knesset special committee that reviewed the declassified files) confirm that doctors routinely performed post-mortem examinations on deceased Yemenite babies and toddlers without any parental permission. These autopsies were conducted in violation of Jewish tradition, which demands the body remain intact for burial. In multiple documented cases, children’s hearts were surgically removed from the tiny corpses. Those hearts were then handed over to American researchers studying why Yemenite Jews exhibited an almost complete absence of heart disease. The organs were shipped abroad as research specimens while the rest of the bodies were hastily buried often in mass or unmarked graves without the parents ever seeing the child, receiving a proper death certificate, or being allowed to participate in the funeral. Parents many illiterate in Hebrew, non-native speakers, and already shattered by the deaths of their children amid the 1949–1954 immigration crisis were simply told “your baby died” and sent away. No explanation of the autopsy. No mention that their infant’s heart had been carved out and exported for foreign science. The book’s medical-historical analysis (especially Shvarts and Weiss’s chapters on policy and health challenges) places these acts in the context of a collapsing hospital system overwhelmed by Operation Magic Carpet immigrants, rampant disease, and a condescending attitude toward “primitive” Mizrahi families. But the archives show the procedures were real, systematic in their indifference, and devastating in their cultural desecration. Even before death, the violations were monstrous. The declassified records and the book detail clusters where severely malnourished Yemenite babies were injected with experimental protein solutions unproven, desperate treatments in a medicine-starved country. At least four of these infants died as a direct result of the injections. Sick children were ripped from their mothers’ arms, isolated in wards or Babies’ Homes where parents were forbidden to stay, and then subjected to these interventions without informed consent or follow-up. A mother might leave her child for “observation” only to return to an empty crib and a curt note. The Yemenite Children Affair does not flinch from these facts. It uses the Netanyahu-released documents to prove the negligence was criminal in scale: babies dying in filth from preventable disease, then being dissected, their hearts harvested for research, their bodies dumped without ceremony. The scholarship is unflinching precisely because it rejects organized kidnapping conspiracies (the archives contain zero evidence of systematic sales or adoptions) while refusing to whitewash the real atrocities committed against the most vulnerable.