Baby Incubators In Seattle
March 19, 2014
6 pm – 7:45 pm
Northeast Branch of the Seattle Public Library
6801 35th Ave NE
Seattle, WA 98115
For more information, email: president@pnwhistorians.org
Baby incubators have long been essential to neonatal intensive care units, a lifesaving technology that has enabled increasingly premature infants a chance of survival. In its earliest decades, however, the baby incubator was a fixture of sideshows and carnival midways, not hospitals. Join historian Paula Becker and neonatal intensive care nurse Amy Caldwell in exploring the early history of baby incubators in Seattle — from their first appearance in a downtown amusement center in 1906, to the Baby Electrobator display at West Seattle’s Luna Park, to the wildly successful Baby Incubator Exhibit at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, to present day neonatal intensive care units.
[author] [author_info]Paula Becker is a staff historian for HistoryLink.org, where her essays document the dance marathon craze of the 1920s and 1930s, the A-Y-P Baby Incubator Exhibit, and the career of The Egg and I author Betty MacDonald, among numerous other subjects. She co-wrote (with Alan J. Stein) the books Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: Washington’s First World’s Fair, and The Future Remembered: The 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and Its Legacy. Paula is a member of the Pacific Northwest Historians Guild.[author_info] [/author]
[author] [author_info]Amy Dunn Caldwell, MN NNP is a neonatal nurse practitioner at the University of Washington Medical Center Neonatal ICU. She has worked in many Seattle-area hospitals, both as a nurse and a nurse practitioner, and over the past twenty-five years has seen an evolution in neonatal care that rivals the change from baby incubator exhibits to neonatal ICUs.[/author_info] [/author]