Dr Martin Couney single-handedly spearheaded the mass use of incubators for premature babies. Over his 45 years of running his “infantoriums”, he saved an estimated 7000 babies who would have otherwise been ignored by healthcare professionals.
What are infantoriums? They were amusements for paying onlookers to gawk at tiny babies clinging to life. This isn’t a great thing, but as a consequentialist, you’d be hard-pressed to argue me out of believing that Couney was a brilliant man for running them.
Martin was not an actual doctor, and initially, he made a lot of money off his incubator baby attractions. However, many of his decisions were not that of a profit-hungry man. His genuine care for the babies meant that, by the end of his life, he had spent all of his savings.
Hospitals eventually got over their lack of compassion and disregard of this medical problem when a real doctor sympathetic to Couney’s cause, Dr Julius Hess, managed to get the hospitals in Chicago to run their own incubators. Dr Hess is considered the father of neonatology and with these two great men, the healthcare policies spread across the nation.