The Antidote

Medicine used to be a lot more curious, as these two tales will show you. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting
for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
From the turn of the century to the nineteen forties,
summer in New York meant one thing. It was time
for a trip to Coney Island. You might rub shoulders
with well heeled Upper East Siders and working class Brooklyn
nights as you wander through the park searching for summer fun.
You could swim in the bay, or brave the wooden
roller coasters, or you could wander the boardwalk and there

(00:58):
Barker's called from direction, urging you to come into their tent.
Did you want to see a four legged woman? Or
how about a boy with a face like a dog.
But nestled among the strong men and sword swallowers was
a completely different kind of attraction, a small awning filled
with even smaller glass boxes, and inside the tiniest babies

(01:19):
you had ever seen. Because from nineteen o three to
nineteen forty three, the best place to care for your
premature baby was doctor Martin Cooney's child hatchery on the
Coney Island boardwalk. At the turn of the century, the
odds for a baby born early weren't great. Hospitals didn't
have the advanced medical technology that helps premature infants both

(01:40):
survive and thrive. Even if they did, however, many wouldn't
have used it. Unfortunately. The attitude at the time was
that premature babies were weak and not meant to live.
If they survived their early birth, great, but if they didn't,
then it just wasn't meant to be. Either way, most
hospitals wouldn't waste valuable time and resources on them. While
this a rule take on survival of the fittest was

(02:02):
common in the medical field, it wasn't the rule. In
the eighteen seventies, several doctors had been inspired by the
incubators used to hatch chickens and were trying to perfect
a version for human babies. By eighteen ninety six, French
doctor Pierre costamp Boudin had invented an incubator that he
called a child hatchery. The device would keep a premature

(02:23):
infant warm and safe from infection long enough to survive.
He sent his assistant, a young trainee named Martin Cooney,
to exhibit his child hatchery at the eighteen ninety six
Great Industrial Exposition in Berlin. For his demonstration in Berlin,
Cooney filled the incubators with live children. It was an
immediate hit. Cooney was invited to exhibitions across Europe and America,

(02:46):
and even displayed the incubators at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.
Soon Cooney had left his mentor behind, touring the United
States with his own improved incubators. As he traveled, he
refined his standard care, employing specially trained nurses and developing
round the clock feeding schedules. After bouncing between expos and

(03:07):
world's Fairs for several years, he decided to open a
permanent home for his incubators in nineteen oh three on
Coney Island, and so there on the boardwalk, passers by
could pay a quarter to step inside and see the
tiny infants. Some were barely more than two or three
pounds in size. To demonstrate that, one nurse would perform
a trick of slipping her wedding ring around a baby's

(03:30):
thin wrist. From the start, there was backlash. Critics felt
that displaying the premies like sideshow freaks was exploitative. Others
worried their proximity to boardwalk trash and unwonted live animals
would invite disease and infection. Still, others took the hospital
stance that these babies shouldn't have medical intervention at all.
And yet to the families whose children were on display,

(03:52):
Cooney wasn't so much a sideshow barker as a saint.
The Coney Island Incubator Show was most families only chance
to save their infants. Expert care was provided free of charge,
covered by every twenty five cent entry fee that people
paid to see them. Anyone could have their premature baby
cared for, regardless of race or class. Doctor Cooney's own daughter,

(04:13):
born premature, spent time in the incubator tent. For forty years,
Cooni's Coney Island attraction cared for thousands of premature babies.
When he was finally ready to retire, it seemed like
the world had finally caught up to his beliefs. In
nineteen forty three, the same year Cooni's Incubators closed their doors,
Cornell Hospital in Manhattan opened the country's first dedicated premature infant.

(04:37):
Ward Cooney was a controversial figure, at times, a showman
and a savior. He was largely dismissed by the medical
community as an opportunist, and when he died in nineteen
fifty it was in relative obscurity. It certainly didn't help
his standing with his critics when it was later discovered
that he had likely lied about his background. That story

(04:57):
about apprenticing under doctor Budan in Paris, Well, it may
have never happened, and Cooney himself might not have actually
been a medical doctor. And still that probably didn't make
a difference to the over six five hundred babies that
doctor Cooney saved. So maybe for all those years nestled
between the swords, swallowers and tattooed ladies, it was doctor

(05:18):
Cooney's tent that was truly the greatest show on Earth.
Here's a lesson that you don't want to learn firsthand.

(05:39):
Rabies totally bites. The virus that sealed Old Yeller's fate
is awful, and once symptoms set in, it's almost guaranteed
to kill you. It attacks the brain and spinal cord,
causing burning sensations, intense headaches, and partial paralysis. As the
disease progresses, it inflicts an arsenal of horrific psychological effects,

(06:00):
starting with anxiety and restlessness, progressing to full on hydrophobia.
That's an extreme fear of water, made worse by intense
muscle spasms that make swallowing water nearly impossible. The fear,
the pain, and the confusion get worse until you either
choke to death on your own saliva or your heart stops.

(06:20):
But here's the good news. The modern rabies vaccine is
pretty bulletproof. It will save your life assuming you get
the shot soon after contracting the virus. But before it
was developed, there was virtually no reliable treatment for those
unlucky enough to contract it. Rabies was a nightmarish prospect
that usually meant certain death. This is best illustrated by

(06:40):
a story from eighteen fifty two, thirty three years before
there was a rabies vaccine. The life of a prairie
man from Illinois was turned upside down one morning when
his nine year old son, Robert, was attacked by a
stray dog. They managed to drive the animal off, but
not before the boy was bitten now dread griped this
man as he examined the way wound. The dog had

(07:01):
been strangely aggressive and frothing at the mouth, both clear
signs of rabies, which meant that Robert had most likely
contracted the disease. This man was well aware of the
seriousness of the situation, having grown up on the frontier
where rabies carrying animals like skunks and bats were common.
At this point, there were only three real options. Option

(07:23):
one except the boy's fate and prepared to put him
out of his misery should the symptoms arise. Option two
cauterized the wound with a piece of hot metal and
hope that that killed the virus before it spread. This
would obviously be painful and probably ineffective, which left option three.
Get Robert to a medical practitioner in possession of a madstone. Now.

(07:46):
While they've fallen out of use today, a madstone was
long thought to be the only antidote against rabies. Beyond that,
the definition can be a bit flexible. Madstones varied in size, shape,
and origin. Most often, though, they were small clumps of
hair and other materials taken from the stomachs or bladders
of wild animals like deer, in other words, hair balls. Now.

(08:09):
Robert's father was an educated man. He worked as a
lawyer in fact, and he didn't put much stock in
folklore remedies, But with no other antidotes available, he was
desperate enough to try anything. After asking around, he learned
about a doctor one state over who actually owned a madstone.
A few hours later, this man and his nine year
old son were on a train bound for Terre Haute, Indiana.

(08:30):
By nightfall, they were seated in the doctor's kitchen, watching
as the gray haired man took a jar down from
the shelf. He removed a small, dark pebble and placed
it in a pot of fresh milk, giving it several
minutes to soak up the liquid. Then he took the
stone and held it against the boy's bite mark. When
he removed his hand, the stone stuck in place, and

(08:50):
that was bad news. The doctor said. It meant that
Robert was infected, but there was still a chance to
save him. For the rest of the night, they kept
the stone pressed against the wound. Whenever it dried out
and fell off, the doctor would place it back in
a pot of boiling milk. Green scum soon rose to
the surface, indicating that the stone had extracted some of
the poison. They repeated the process until it was almost mourning,

(09:14):
and finally, as dawn broke, the stone refused to stick
to the wound. The poison had all been soaked up.
Now the lawyer was skeptical, but also hopeful. He asked
the doctor for the bill, but the man refused payment,
saying that taking money for using a madstone would dampen
its efficacy. And yeah, the lawyer wasn't sure what to
make of that, But after a few days, Robert still

(09:37):
had not displayed any raby symptoms. They returned home to Springfield,
relieved and eager to put the experience behind them, and
the lawyer still wasn't sure that he believed in the madstone.
Then he didn't speak of it much after that, but
the people of Tara Hate remembered the visit, especially a
few years later when that lawyer, or should I say
Abraham Lincoln, became the sixteenth President of the United State.

(10:00):
Dates I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the
Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or
learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
This show was created by me, Aaron Mankey in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show

(10:23):
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television
show and you can learn all about it over at
the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.