The issue on relying on heroes like Link is that we end up waiting for them being born which can take decades. This is why Hyrule’s is constantly in a state of terror and the land is under attack by the forces of evil. Anyway Zelda did you get the picture up there? look at that thing it has to be over 200 pounds, if we let a chimp like that fight it could rip Gannon to shreds.
Thousands of premature infants were saved from certain death by being part of a Coney Island entertainment sideshow.
At the time premature babies were considered genetically inferior, and were simply left to fend for themselves and ultimately die.
Dr Martin Couney offered desperate parents a pioneering solution that was as expensive as it was experimental - and came up with a very unusual way of covering the costs.
It was Coney Island in the early 1900’s. Beyond the Four-Legged Woman, the sword swallowers, and “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” was an entirely different exhibit: rows of tiny, premature human babies living in glass incubators.
The brainchild of this exhibit was Dr. Martin Couney, an enigmatic figure in the history of medicine. Couney created and ran incubator-baby exhibits on the island from 1903 to the early 1940s.
Behind the gaudy facade, premature babies were fighting for their lives, attended by a team of medical professionals.To see them, punters paid 25 cents.The public funding paid for the expensive care, which cost about $15 a day in 1903 (the equivalent of $405 today) per incubator.
Couney was in the lifesaving business, and he took it seriously. The exhibit was immaculate. When new children arrived, dropped off by panicked parents who knew Couney could help them where hospitals could not, they were immediately bathed, rubbed with alcohol and swaddled tight, then “placed in an incubator kept at 96 or so degrees, depending on the patient. Every two hours, those who could suckle were carried upstairs on a tiny elevator and fed by breast by wet nurses who lived in the building. The rest [were fed by] a funneled spoon. The smallest baby Couney handled is reported to have weighed a pound and a half.
His nurses all wore starched white uniforms and the facility was always spotlessly clean.
An early advocate of breast feeding, if he caught his wet nurses smoking or drinking they were sacked on the spot. He even employed a cook to make healthy meals for them.
The incubators themselves were a medical miracle, 40 years ahead of what was being developed in America at that time.
Each incubator was made of steel and glass and stood on legs, about 5ft tall. A water boiler on the outside supplied hot water to a pipe running underneath a bed of mesh, upon which the baby slept.
Race, economic class, and social status were never factors in his decision to treat and Couney never charged the parents for the babies care.The names were always kept anonymous, and in later years the doctor would stage reunions of his “graduates.
According to historian Jeffrey Baker, Couney’s exhibits “offered a standard of technological care not matched in any hospital of the time.”
Throughout his decades of saving babies, Couney understood there were better options. He tried to sell, or even donate, his incubators to hospitals, but they didn’t want them. He even offered all his incubators to the city of New York in 1940, but was turned down.
In a career spanning nearly half a century he claimed to have saved nearly 6,500 babies with a success rate of 85 per cent, according to the Coney Island History
In 1943, Cornell New York Hospital opened the city’s first dedicated premature infant station. As more hospitals began to adopt incubators and his techniques, Couney closed the show at Coney Island. He said his work was done.
Today, one in 10 babies born in the United States is premature, but their chance of survival is vastly improved—thanks to Couney and the carnival babies.
‘straight men are terrified of showing platonic affection for other men because they’re afraid people will assume they’re gay’ now i hope this doesn’t sound too harsh but maybe if straight dudes, as a group, hadn’t spent decades
demonizing,
demeaning,
disenfranchising, criminalizing, pathologizing, brutalizing,
vilifying, mocking, and murdering gay men at every opportunity maybe being mistaken for a queer wouldn’t be such a federal fucking issue
The fucking melodrama, jesus christ. Straight men “as a group” haven’t done anything to you.
maybe not individually, but a collective group of a systematic level they have oppressed gay men (and other LGBT people) for centuries
Straight men haven’t done anything “as a group”, societal homophobia wasn’t invented by straight men. You’re just looking for a scapegoat.
My life’s much better recently. Since we last talked, I’ve:
- HODLed bitcoin and made far more money than I’d ever be able to save up normally
- significantly improved my mental health to the point where I now consider myself to be “in remission” from depression and it no longer holds any power over me
- moved to a new city, much closer to the culture
- taught myself several valuable 3D art skills, up to an intermediate level (Daz, Blender, Marvelous Designer, etc.)
- Got involved in an art community and developed a small following of fans, with a view to one day start a Patreon and turn my hobby into my living
- Finally realised I have ADHD, got a diagnosis and started medication
- Found new ways to enjoy life
There’s been negatives too, of-course, but why bring ‘em up? I just wanted to let you know that life’s good right now. I know I used to whine a lot about my mental health on here, but I’ve never been happier than I am right now.
