Starting life in a home-made incubator: how a vet's ingenuity saved his premature son's life

In a small village in the province of Valladolid, Castile and León, in the late 1950s, the combined ingenuity of a young veterinary surgeon and a doctor on the verge of retirement made it possible for a baby weighing less than 900 grams to survive, against all odds, thanks to the makeshift incubator they improvised together.

That baby was Eugenio Ampudia, a renowned conceptual artist, who came to the world "suddenly", in the middle of a heavy snowfall, on January 16th 1959 in Melgar de Arriba, a village of just 600 inhabitants.

Ampudia is preparing to tell his story at the inaugural session of the XXVII Congress of Neonatology and Perinatal Medicine, which will be held from October 2nd to 4th in Madrid, to give hope to parents who face the anguish of a premature child.

Eugenio was the son of a young vet who had come to the village from the city a few months earlier to open a practice, and who teamed up with the local doctor, Cesidio Villalba, to build a makeshift incubator in his house, "half equine, half human", with "whatever they had to hand".

An insulated room with a cot surrounded by glass bottles filled with hot water that kept the room at a constant temperature was the "small R&D project" that the two medical professionals devised, trying to solve problems as they arose, "without an instruction manual".

"The main thing about this story is that they combined their knowledge of human medicine and veterinary medicine, pooled their information and built something that worked at a time when such a premature baby had little chance of survival and much less so in a remote village."

Before becoming pregnant with Eugenio, his mother had miscarried her previous baby at five months "and then I came, at 26 weeks, and my father decided to put all his knowledge into practice to try to keep me alive as long as possible."

The artist emphasises that his father "was an pure enthusiast, and that the doctor went along with his plan, and my mother looked on in amazement at everything they did."

Eugenio remained in his peculiar incubator for about four months. When he was five months old, his parents took him to León for a first time consultation with the pediatrician, who after examining him "concluded that I must have been about 20 days old" - proof of just how tiny Eugenio was: "I would have been about the same size and weight as a pack of churros," he says.

Although he suffered a few health problems during the first three years of his life as a result of being premature, from there on in "everything went well, although I always had the feeling that my mother looked at me as if I was going to evaporate at any time."

Not only does he not suffer any kind of long-term physical or intellectual problems, he has practically never gone to the doctors. Nor did he stay small in size: he is the tallest of his brothers, who were all born at term.

Eugenio's story is dotted with anecdotes from the moment of his baptism, which had more of a "burial" atmosphere than a celebration, he says. In fact, his grandfather was reluctant to be the godfather, because he did not want to sponsor "a dead person".

And his case is still remembered in the village, at least among the older members of the community. He had the opportunity to check it a few years ago when he visited the village with his wife and one of his daughters. There he met an elderly lady and he asked about the old vet's house and when he identified himself as his son, she said: "Ah, you are Eugenito, we thought you were dead!"

"The long and the short of it is that in deepest, darkest Castile and León, in the middle of a snowstorm, I was born suddenly and without warning, and an ambitious plan was hatched to keep me alive."

Eugenio wants to draw attention to the supreme effort made by his father and the doctor who helped him in the whole "adventure" and recognises that "if I had been the teacher's son, I probably would not have survived, and if my father had not been a young veterinary surgeon who had a natural curiosity for everything, he would not have succeeded."

"If 60 years ago a doctor and a vet from rural Spain got me to survive and in good health, now that everything is much more structured it is much easier for everything to go well," concludes the artist.