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Benjamin Spock
1903–1998 · 95 years Tier II
An Olympic oarsman who told mothers to trust themselves
He was 6 feet 4 inches and rowed for Yale, and in the summer of 1924 he sat in the American eight that took the Olympic gold in Paris. That is the part of the résumé nobody expects. The rest was his father's doing. Benjamin Ives Spock was a Yale man and general counsel of the New Haven Railroad, and he sent his son along the same track — Hamden Hall, Phillips Andover, Yale. Spock read literature and history there, married Jane Cheney in 1927, spent two years at the Yale medical school, then finished first in his class at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1929. Then he did the thing no pediatrician had done before and went off to study psychoanalysis.
The book came out in 1946 as The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, and its argument fit in seven words: you know more than you think you do. Until then parents had been told to feed on a schedule and not to pick up a crying baby. It sold 500,000 copies in six months and 50 million by the time he died, in 42 languages, and by the New York Times's reckoning only the Bible outsold it across its first 52 years. He taught at the Mayo Clinic, then Pittsburgh, then Case Western Reserve, while colleagues complained that his evidence was anecdote. Then he turned political: SANE in 1962, a federal conspiracy conviction in 1968 for counseling draft resistance, and the People's Party nomination for president in 1972.
His most consequential sentence was about sleep. From the 1958 edition, the book told parents not to lay infants on their backs, on the grounds that a baby who vomited might choke. Doctors repeated it almost without dissent into the 1990s. Later studies found that sleeping face down sharply raises the risk of sudden infant death, and one researcher calculated that as many as 50,000 infant deaths in Europe, Australia and the United States could have been avoided had the advice changed in 1970, when the evidence for it already existed. Teachers of evidence-based medicine now use the episode as their standard case. The other charge against him was louder and thinner. Norman Vincent Peale and Spiro Agnew blamed him for a generation raised on instant gratification, a charge that surfaced only after he opposed the war.
He divorced Jane Cheney in 1976 after 49 years, married Mary Morgan 40 years his junior, and lived mostly on boats for the next two decades. At 84 he finished third in a four-mile rowing race across the Sir Francis Drake Channel. By 1991 he could not walk without help. The seventh edition of the book, out just after he died, told parents to put children on an all-plant diet after age two, and T. Berry Brazelton called that absolutely insane. In February 1998 the New York Times ran a story headlined Dr. Spock, Old and Infirm, Needs Money. He died on March 15 at a rented house in La Jolla, aged 94, and his ashes went to Rockport, Maine.
Lifespan
Benjamin Spock's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
book
500,000 copies in six months and 50 million by 1998, in 42 languages 1946 -
Dr. Spock on Vietnam
book
The war book, written while his draft-resistance case was running — -
People's Party presidential campaign
other
Ran with Julius Hobson on free medical care, a guaranteed income and withdrawal from every foreign posting 1972 -
Greer v. Spock
case
He sued for the right to campaign at Fort Dix and the Supreme Court ruled against him 1976 -
Spock on Spock
book
An autobiography written with his second wife, Mary Morgan —
Life in brief
with age at each point- May 2, 1903 aged 0 Born at New Haven to the New Haven Railroad's general counsel One of six children. His younger sister Marjorie became an environmental writer.
- 1924 aged ~21 Rows in the American eight that wins Olympic gold in Paris
- 1929 aged ~26 Graduates first in his class at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons He had married Jane Cheney two years earlier.
- 1946 aged ~43 Publishes The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care Five hundred thousand copies sold in the first six months.
- 1958 aged ~55 The new edition tells parents not to lay infants on their backs The advice held for four decades and was wrong.
- 1968 aged ~65 Convicted with William Sloane Coffin and three others of conspiring to counsel draft resistance The two-year sentence was never served. A federal court set the conviction aside in 1969.
- 1972 aged ~69 Runs for president as the People's Party nominee with Julius Hobson
- 1976 aged ~73 Divorces Jane Cheney after 49 years and marries Mary Morgan
- March 15, 1998 aged 94 Dies at a rented house in La Jolla, California, aged 94
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