Mothering Machines: The Promise of Infant Incubators in the Early Twentieth Century

Before incubators became a stable feature of hospital care for infants, North American audiences flocked to see tiny babies on display in incubator exhibits at fairs and carnivals. While the babies themselves were no doubt a draw, incubators also captured imaginations as symbols of scientific progress. Described as mechanical wombs, these medical machines were praised as substitute mothers, offering even better care to these babies than their own parents. Examining the popular media and medical discourse surrounding incubator shows, this paper explores the specific promise of the incubator as an artificial mother, asking why this technological replacement for mothers appeared so appealing to audiences in the first decade of the twentieth century. I argue that public health concerns about inexperienced mothers aligned with a medical construction of the uterus as delicate and faulty, motivating desires for a mechanical replacement for mothers' bodies and care. Biological mothers were replaced by a new technological system of incubators plus carefully supervised nursing, which together became a kind of artificial mother. This was a system deliberately modelled on chicken incubation, offering a eugenic promise of supervised human reproduction.