Dr Spock

Benjamin McLane Spock, family doctor to the world, died on March 15th 1998, aged 94

It was, on the face of it, an odd book to have become one of the bestsellers of the century. The one endeavour the human race was used to, and indeed had become quite good at, was having babies and bringing them to adulthood. Benjamin Spock, who seemed continually to be surprised, and perhaps disturbed, by his success, acknowledged that parents already knew, if instinctively, much of what he set down in his handbook, first published in 1946 under the title The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Although the title was changed from time to time as the book went through numerous editions, and its contents were updated to take note of single-parent families and other social developments, he retained the sentence that was the key to his teaching: “Trust yourself – you know more than you think you do.”

It is unlikely that many of the 50m copies said to have been sold around the world were ever read through from cover to cover. This was a book to be consulted if, say, Baby was reluctant to get to sleep or had kicked over its potty. The parent would consult the relevant page (helped by Dr Spock’s very detailed index), and, reassured by his words, do what she thought best anyway. Many parents gained from the book the comfort once provided by the family Bible. It was a rock to lean on; far too much, said Dr Spock’s critics.

In the late 1940s, the memories of the recent war, and the threat of an even worse one, may have made parents feel especially protective; or, as the doctor’s critics put it, their children were indulged. “Spockmanship” was denounced by Spiro Agnew, vice-president from 1969 to 1973 (when he resigned over a corruption scandal). By then the post-war children had grown up and were credited, or discredited, with the permissive society. Blame the parents, said the Agnew camp, but particularly blame the sinister Dr Spock. The doctor insisted that his book, by then seen by some Americans as subversive as the works of Marx, had not encouraged permissiveness; it aimed rather to relax rigidity. But it wasn’t the book alone that drew fire. Dr Spock himself was now a political figure, an opponent of the Vietnam war.

In 1968, after being arrested at various anti-war demonstrations, Dr Spock appeared before a Boston court accused of helping Americans to dodge the draft. The government regarded him as a formidable nuisance. He shone on television: clearly middle-class, the son of a lawyer, educated at Yale, with the warmth that you expected from a children’s doctor, and above all the author of this marvellous book. He could not even be called a coward: he had served in the American navy in the second world war, and had supported the Korean war. But the Vietnam war, he told the court, was “illegal, immoral” and “unwinnable”. It was certainly unwinnable, as the generals later acknowledged. But the court was unimpressed by the doctor’s words and gave him two years in prison, a sentence that was, however, quashed on appeal.

In 1972 Dr Spock ran for president as candidate for the People’s Party, a mildly socialist group more European than American in feeling. Even now its platform looks improbable: free medical care, legal

abortion and marijuana, a guaranteed minimum income for a family, and the withdrawal of American troops from abroad. He received a pretty modest 75,000 votes. He seemed not to be discouraged. Into his 80s he was being arrested in anti-nuclear demos that stretched the limits of American tolerance. His view of nuclear war was simple, if conventional: “There’s no point in raising children if they’re going to be burned alive.”

He wrote 13 books, some in collaboration with other writers, but only a few remain in print. All are distinguished by the clear writing of the baby book, but these days probably no one cares to read Dr Spock on Vietnam, published in 1968.

It would be nice to say that domestically, anyway, Dr Spock’s life wentsmoothly. But he dumped his first wife, Jane, after 49 years of marriage, and then married a woman 40 years his junior. Jane grumbled that she helped a lot with the baby book and should have been credited as co-author. They had two sons, who in Dr Spock’s autobiography are rather shadowy figures, perhaps because, sensibly, he tried to keep them out of the limelight. But his stepdaughter, by his second wife, seems to have been a terror unresponsive to every trick in his book. “‘Ginger,’ I said one day, ‘in my 75 years I’ve been acquainted with thousands of people, but not one of them has been as rude as you.’ I thought I saw a faint smile of triumph.”

Although the two made peace as Ginger grew up, Dr Spock never found an easy answer for society’s increasing problem of what he called “naturally accursed, naturally poisonous” step relations. But in the vast child-care literature that has grown up since Dr Spock opened up this profitable marketplace, there is probably a book about it. Or if not, somebody no doubt will soon write one.