Entertaining and instructing the public: John Zahorsky's 1904 incubator institute

In 1904 American physician John Zahorsky managed an incubator institute at the Louisiana Purchase Expositiioon in St. Louis, Missouri. For Zahorsky the incubator became a focal point for organizing medical care, for evaluating existing practices and for developing new ones. His efforts resulted in markedly improved survival rates for premature infants. Despite his success, however, his findings never became part of the medical literature on prematurity. Zahorsky himself believed that physicians dismissed his work because of his association with showmen. This paper also suggests that his were not practical findings. The incubator was too heavy to be used for home births among middle class families and the equipment and nursing care were too expensive to be used with hospitalized infants from tenements. Zahorsky recognized that the incubator somehow diminished the humanity of premature infants, for parents sometimes did not reclaim infants lent to the exhibit. The infant on exhibit became a commodity at a time when babies were offered for sale by advertisement. The incubator institute illustrated the prevailing sensibility about infants, one context in which medical research took place, and the relationships among commerce, entertainment, medical practices, and medical science in the United States early in the twentieth century.