The hatbox baby

by Carrie Brown

"On a sweltering summer morning in 1933, a baby is delivered in a hatbox to the Century of Progress Exposition - the World's Fair - in Chicago.". "This very tiny baby, born three months early, is brought by his desperate young father to the fair's famous baby doctor, Leo Hoffman, to be saved. Dr. Hoffman - part showman, part scientist - finances his neonatal research by exhibiting a collection of live premature babies in their incubators. His "Infantorium," with its giant test-tube fountain spouting pink-and-blue water and its pair of wading storks, attracts huge, gawking crowds every sultry day.". "At the fair, a place of freaks and marvels, mysteries, miracles - and even murders - the notion of what is "normal" and what is not comes into question daily. And before the summer ends and the fair closes, a number of remarkable persons will invest heavily in this fragile baby's life: Dr. Hoffman; his registered nurses; his wet nurses; the baby's spinster aunt; Caroline Day, the beautiful