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Maternité Lion in New York City

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Maternité Lion in New York City

In late October 1897, a branch of the Paris Maternité Lion opened to the public at 5 West Eighteenth Street, near Fifth Avenue, in a glass-roofed hall formerly known as Logerot Hall and at one time attached to the Hotel Logerot. The New York Sun account, syndicated widely, described the premises as “high, light and airy,” fitted out to hold roughly twenty of Alexandre Lion’s incubators, of which only three were occupied in the opening weeks. The wire had already carried notice of the establishment by 19 October, when the Boston Evening Transcript listed among the day’s domestic news the first Lion infant incubator established in this country; the New York Times reported the building “thrown open to the public” for inspection on or about 25 October, and the New York Herald ran a descriptive opening notice on 7 November. The institution was presented not as a temporary exhibit but as a permanent facility on the model of those already operating in Paris, Nice, and Berlin — though, as several papers frankly noted, it was sustained in part by admission fees paid by a steady daily stream of curious visitors.

Operationally, the New York branch reproduced the Paris system in detail. Each incubator was tended by a trained nurse dressed in gray with white apron, collars, cuffs, and cap; a chief matron and her corps worked in “watches” through the night, urgency calls being said to fall most often between midnight and daybreak. On admission, each infant judged free of contagion had its name, age, length, weight, temperature, and general condition — together with its parents’ names, residence, and calling — entered in the institute “life book,” these particulars and the child’s daily progress being posted before the incubator for public information. Fresh air was drawn through a pipe opening some fourteen feet above the street, then filtered, heated, and thermostatically regulated before entering the cases. The most striking clinical detail, seized upon by every popular account, was the feeding of the weakest infants through the nose by means of a specially curved spoon, drop by drop, every two hours — a procedure the Cincinnati Enquirer, Indianapolis Journal, and Philadelphia Inquirer all carried under near-identical headlines lifted from the Cincinnati Commercial.

Images from The Philadelphia Times, January 23, 1898.

The named staff of record were M. and Mme. Narcon, director and matron, described as having been connected with several European branches and as having themselves a daughter, then six years old, saved by an incubator; the physician and head nurse were both French, and much of the staff was said to have come from the Paris institution. The Sun’s reporter and the San Francisco Call supplied the human-interest detail typical of the genre — infants called François Capdeville, Agnes Powers, and a fuller Bordeaux case, “Marie,” recalled by Mme. Narcon — alongside sketches of policemen and “swell people” gawking over the railings.

Aside from the generally favorable press coverage, the establishment was publicized in a large photo spread and article in the December 9, 1897 issue of Leslie’s Weekly. The comfortable living room environment with plants and armchairs is quite a contrast from today’s neonatal intensive care units! The Institute was also the subject of two articles in the The Literary Digest in 1898

Source: The Literary Digest.
Source: Leslie’s Weekly.

Display ads appeared in The New York Herald, The New York Times, and The World from October 24, 1897 to early December, 1897, and then stopped abruptly. I was not able to find any news stories or advertisements documenting either the Institute’s continued operation or closure after January 1898, so the outcome remains unknown.

Feature Articles

Newspaper Sources

  • “Lion Institute Opened,” The New York Times, 26 October 1897, p. 4.
  • “Lion Institute Opened: Description of the Infant Incubator,” New York Herald, 7 November 1897, p. 7.
  • “This Evening’s News” (domestic summary), Boston Evening Transcript, 19 October 1897.
  • “Baby Incubator: Machines Working on Sickly and Premature Infants” [New York Sun], The Brooklyn Daily Times, 23 December 1897, p. 3.
  • “Some Incubator Babies: Three Little Lives Being Saved at the Lion Institute,” The San Francisco Call, 6 March 1898, p. 25.
  • “Progress in Science… Feeding the Tots Through the Nose,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 28 November 1897, p. 21.
  • “Babies Fed Through the Nose,” The Indianapolis Journal, 13 December 1897, p. 2.
  • “Babies Fed Through the Nose,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 December 1897, p. 27.
  • “The Lion Incubators in New York” / “For the Feeble Babies,” Leslie’s Weekly, reprinted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 29 December 1897, p. 9, and The Philadelphia Times, 23 January 1898, p. 22.
  • “Incubators for Children,” The Montreal Star, October 30, 197, p. 17.
  • “Künstliche Kinderpflege,” Der Buffalo Demokrat, 13 March 1898, p. 6.

Last Updated on 07/05/26