A Carnival Attraction That Saved Premature Babies (2016) | Hacker News Reader

A Carnival Attraction That Saved Premature Babies (2016)

smithsonianmag.com

119 pointspr337h4m19 comments

> thinning gray hair, a mustache and a stoop, something he jokingly attributed to a lifetime of bending over babies

My granddad always used to say his lack of hair on top of his head was from all his teachers patting him on the head and telling him how a good boy he was when growing up. Knowing him, that's definitely not true, heh. Did all kinds of mostly harmless stuff. Like returned bottles for a deposit, waited until the clerk put them out back, went to fetch them and deposited them again, until getting caught.

> There’s an old apartment building in South Minneapolis that looks totally out of place. It’s in a residential neighborhood with small bungalows and some auto body shops. And in the early 1900s, it used to be part of an amusement park called Wonderland. The park’s biggest attraction wasn’t the roller coaster, or the dance hall, or the log flume. It was a sideshow called “the Infantorium.” Visitors would pay ten cents to enter a spacious room full of glass boxes that were incubators with tiny premature babies on display. But despite how weird this whole concept might seem today, this wasn’t the only place this was happening.

99% Invisible Podcast: [0]The Infantorium

0: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-infantorium/

This reminds me of "The King's Speech". A competent quack isn't necessarily an oxymoron. As a self-taught programmer that's encouraging.

I don't think he was a quack, he wasn't selling anything counterfactual or deceptive. He was outside the mainstream, but more in the sense of a specialist than a fraudster. And his novel funding model allowed care when none else could be afforded.

> he wasn't selling anything counterfactual or deceptive

He was saying he is a physician, and by all evidence he wasn't. That's both deceptive and counterfactual.

I think 6,500 alive babies is probably a better credential then a diploma on a wall.

Doesn’t make it not strictly fraudulent.

Don’t worry, the world will never lack for Great Bureaucrats to tut-tut 6500 babies irregularly saved, and to regulate away the likelihood of such atrocities happening on the regular.

That is the “competent” part from the “competent quack”.

Obviously if we can believe his numbers, that is.

It's really amazing how back then people could just come to the US and completely reinvent themselves. William Mulholland was a poor Irish kid with almost no education who became a self-taught engineer and completely reshaped the future of Los Angeles. Stuff like that just can't happen anymore.

> Stuff like that just can't happen anymore.

Ya sure about that? You can be a fraudster in the UK, have your medical degree revoked, and go to the US as a fraudster without a medical degree... And be a leader!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield

So many of the best programmers I have worked with are self taught! The key is if they keep learning as they go, because self education can skip some theory, and every changes too.

Somewhere along the way CS became really popular so you'd get people with nice credentials and zero passion to do the actual work. Let's fight that paper ceiling.

I’d go further and say that writing code for a living requires a great deal of self-teaching regardless of your background. CS degrees typically don’t teach you how to build software, and even if they did, the problem space is huge. There is a lifetime of self-teaching to do from the moment you take your first job.

I think that my being self-taught helped my career quite a bit. It did make it harder to get in the door, but that was just a one-time problem to solve.

People forget that all doctors were quacks (to borrow your meaning, loosely) until 1847 when the AMA was founded to promote medical licensing; and/or until Flexner’s report to Congress that there were too many unlicensed doctors not using enough pharmaceuticals (1910), the standardization of allopathic medicine and founding of the Federation of State Medical Boards (1912)

In general, licensure is a great tool to hold the pool of practitioners to a high standard, few if any areas being more important than medicine.

But if someone has saved 6,500 children from dying, it doesn't make any sense to get hung up on it, especially if other doctors are working with him and have no issues with his methods and ability.

Those that are obsessed with process over results make my head hurt. Might as well declare all self-taught programmers as useless when it's clear they're a massive benefit.

I hope they could correctly keep track which baby belonged to which parents

Why wouldn't they?

Maybe they didn't exist.

Empty city streets, factories run by children.

Where were all the adults?

Because the chaotic environment of a fair is combined with multiple babies

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