[HN Gopher] A Carnival Attraction That Saved Premature Babies (2...
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A Carnival Attraction That Saved Premature Babies (2016)
Author : pr337h4m
Score : 105 points
Date : 2025-08-02 18:45 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| delichon wrote:
| This reminds me of "The King's Speech". A competent quack isn't
| necessarily an oxymoron. As a self-taught programmer that's
| encouraging.
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| > 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.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| I think 6,500 alive babies is probably a better credential
| then a diploma on a wall.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Doesn't make it not strictly fraudulent.
| afthonos wrote:
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| That is the "competent" part from the "competent quack".
|
| Obviously if we can believe his numbers, that is.
| imzadi wrote:
| 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.
| kkkqkqkqkqlqlql wrote:
| > 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
| georgeecollins wrote:
| 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.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| 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)
| Aardwolf wrote:
| I hope they could correctly keep track which baby belonged to
| which parents
| dpassens wrote:
| Why wouldn't they?
| codr7 wrote:
| Maybe they didn't exist.
|
| Empty city streets, factories run by children.
|
| Where were all the adults?
| matsemann wrote:
| > _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.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > 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/
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