The Strange Case of Dr. Couney by Dawn Raffel

The Strange Case of Dr. Couney by Dawn Raffel

"A mosaic mystery told in vignettes, cliffhangers, curious asides, and some surreal plot twists as Raffel investigates the secrets of the man who changed infant care in America."--NPR, 2018's Great Reads

What kind of doctor puts his patients on display? This is the spellbinding tale of a mysterious Coney Island doctor who revolutionized neonatal care more than one hundred years ago and saved some seven thousand babies. Dr. Martin Couney's story is a kaleidoscopic ride through the intersection of ebullient entrepreneurship, enlightened pediatric care, and the wild culture of world's fairs at the beginning of the American Century.

As Dawn Raffel recounts, Dr. Couney used incubators and careful nursing to keep previously doomed infants alive, while displaying these babies alongside sword swallowers, bearded ladies, and burlesque shows at Coney Island, Atlantic City, and venues across the nation. How this turn-of-the-twentieth-century émigré became the savior to families with premature infants--known then as "weaklings"--as he ignored the scorn of the medical establishment and fought the rising popularity of eugenics is one of the most astounding stories of modern medicine. Dr. Couney, for all his entrepreneurial gusto, is a surprisingly appealing character, someone who genuinely cared for the well-being of his tiny patients. But he had something to hide...

Drawing on historical documents, original reportage, and interviews with surviving patients, Dawn Raffel tells the marvelously eccentric story of Couney's mysterious carnival career, his larger-than-life personality, and his unprecedented success as the savior of the fragile wonders that are tiny, tiny babies.
 
A New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy Title
A Real Simple Best Book of 2018
Christopher Award-winner

Dawn Raffel is the author of two story collections, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division, and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her fiction has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, Conjunctions, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Quarterly, NOON, and many others. She has taught in the MFA program at Columbia University, and at Summer Literary Seminars in Montreal and St. Petersburg, Russia. She is an editor at large for Reader's Digest, and the editor of The Literarian, the online journal for the Center for Fiction.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781524744960
ISBN 10	1524744964
Title	The Strange Case of Dr. Couney
Author	Dawn Raffel
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	2019-09-10
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.