(Source of picture: Florida State Archives)

PRECIOUS BUNDLES -- As shown in this photo, three newborns lie in an infant incubator at a Jacksonville hospital in about 1904.  Baby incubators had been a curiosity at the Chicago World's Fair just eleven years before.  They were used primarily for the prematurely-born infants. 

Incubators were also exhibited at other world's fairs, and a would-be young actor named Archibald Leach toiled as a barker outside one of these displays, shouting "Don't pass the babies by!"  Leach would later achieve fame under his stage name, Cary Grant.

Initially, many physicians and parents avoided the use of incubators because they considered them to be unhygienic and because most parents (who gave birth at home) were reluctant to entrust their babies to doctors for hospital care.  Jimmy Carter, in fact, was the first US president to have been born in a hospital in 1924. 

Until well into the 1900s, numerous people had uneasy feelings about hospitals in general.  These perceptions were due partly to the original purposes of many hospitals.  During the later 1800s, the institutions had been established in America largely for health-care of indigent people, out-of-towners, and other patients who did not have adequate housing for treatment & recuperation.  Many people saw the places as relatively unclean, uncomfortable, & unfriendly, not offering the benefits that derived from one's own home and family doctor.

During the early 1900s, nevertheless, Jacksonville's local hospitals made some real contributions.  In 1909, for example, St. Luke's Hospital recorded Florida's first surgery for contractive deformity in children.  During the next year at St. Luke's, physicians performed the state's first operation for cleft palate & harelip.  And at St. Luke's in 1913, the ability to walk was surgically restored to a seven-year-old boy who had been able to only move around on all fours.