Martin Arthur Couney (born Michael Cohen, 1869 – March 1, 1950) was an American obstetrician of German-Jewish descent, an advocate and pioneer of early neonatal technology.

[2] After allegedly apprenticing under Pierre-Constant Budin, an established French obstetrician in the 1890s, Couney began exhibiting incubators at expositions and fairgrounds around In Europe, and then America.

During Couney's active years at fairgrounds across America, it was widely believed that premature babies were "weaklings", who were unfit to survive into adulthood.

[7] There is some evidence to suggest that Couney immigrated to the United States in 1888 when he was 19 years old; however this casts doubt on his claims both of having completed a medical degree and of having studied under Budin, due to the inconsistencies in this timeline.

[9] Despite the many unknowns of Couney's life, it is widely accepted that he was an apprentice under Budin in Paris, an established obstetrician, known as the founder of modern perinatal medicine.

[6] Stéphane Tarnier, a prominent French obstetrician in the nineteenth century, has been widely recognised as the first to implement incubators in the care of human infants.

[8] At the Coney Island 'Infantorium', Couney worked in tandem with established doctor Julius Hess and he employed a team of nurses who lived onsite, taking care of the premature infants at all hours.

Couney was influenced by one of his employed nurses, and later wife, Annabelle Maye who insisted upon the importance of strict hygiene and systematic procedure.

[11] The entrance fees covered not only the care of the infants, but also allowed Couney to pay his nurses a good wage and facilitated the frequent travel of the exhibit.

While under his employment, wet nurses were not allowed to smoke, consume foods such as hamburgers, or drink alcohol, as Couney believed doing so would impact the quality of their breastmilk.

[12] Indeed, in 1897 as Couney was starting his career in the field of neonatology, an anonymous source in the medical journal The Lancet condemned the exposition as “an unscrupulous way to make money”.

In 1934, in order to demonstrate the importance and success rates of the incubators, Couney hosted a reunion at the Chicago World Fair for the babies that he and Hess had cared for in 1933.

[7] The facility cost $75,000 ($1.4 million today) to construct and was fronted by a huge sign bearing the words, “Living Babies in Incubators”.

It was not long after the end of the fair that Chicago became the first American city to officially implement policies for the explicit purpose of premature infant care.

His exhibits worked against the claims of the then popular eugenics movement and helped introduce the issue of premature births to the general populace.

Due to the high fatality rates of prematurely born infants in the first half of the twentieth century, the topic was generally undiscussed.

[4] The prominence of the eugenics movement led many doctors at the time to perceive Couney as farcical, and premature babies often left to die without medical intervention.