https://youtu.be/2DfUjc7eb8U?si=A-pQkLuT4hYrcIvs
From the description of the video on YouTube:
If you've seen "cabbage patch babies" as cute folklore, this will change how you see it. This episode traces the real history behind the imagery: early cinema, incubator baby exhibitions, foundling wheels, and the orphan trains, then asks why the same visual keeps repeating for 800 years.
The oldest surviving narrative film (1900) shows a fairy pulling living babies out of an oversized cabbage and setting them down like produce. The director was Alice Guy-Blaché, and the question is not "is it real," the question is why this was one of the first stories cinema ever told.
In 1896 Paris, Alice Guy walks into an incubator exhibition where premature infants are kept in glass boxes modeled after chicken egg hatcheries, funded by paid admission from the public. Three months later she films a story where babies are "grown" and harvested from a garden.
Then the postcards arrive. Between 1900 and 1920, cabbage-baby postcards flood Europe and North America from dozens of studios across multiple countries and languages. Art historians call them whimsical birth announcements, but the imagery is often commercial and transactional: babies tended like crops, "selected" like goods, delivered like inventory.
Now hold that postcard era next to what was happening in real life. In America, the orphan trains moved roughly 200,000 to 250,000 children (many not true orphans) from Eastern cities to the Midwest and beyond, where families inspected and chose them on platforms. Many children arrived without
