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Famed pediatrician Dr. Spock dies at age 94
March 16, 1998
Dr. Spock
Web posted at: 3:22 p.m. EST (2022 GMT)In this story:
SAN DIEGO (CNN) -- Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician who influenced millions of parents in the United States and around the world to raise their children with love and common sense, died at age 94 at his home here Sunday.
"He died with his family at home," Dr. Stephen Pauker, who had been Spock's physician for 12 years, said Monday. He did not give the cause of death.
CNN's Dan Ronan looks back at the life of Dr. SpockSpock had suffered a heart attack, stroke and several bouts of pneumonia.
Spock's "Baby and Child Care," first published in 1946, was the bible of parents in the baby boom that followed World War II. "Trust yourself," Spock told parents. "You know more than you think you do."
The book, which will go into its seventh updated edition on May 2 to celebrate more than 50 years in print, has become the world's best-selling nonfiction publication after the Bible, with over 50 million copies in print. May 2 would have been Spock's 95th birthday.
"I wanted to be supportive of parents rather than to scold them," he said. The book set out very deliberately to counteract some of the rigidities of pediatric tradition, particularly in infant feeding.
"It emphasized the importance of great differences between individual babies, of the need for flexibility and of the lack of necessity to worry constantly about spoiling."
In subsequent years, as the paperback sold 50 million copies and was translated into more than 30 languages, Spock came under fire from critics who branded him the "the father of permissiveness," responsible for a "Spock-marked" generation of hippies.
Spock joined those youths in protests against nuclear technology and the Vietnam War. Vice President Spiro Agnew accused him of corrupting the youth of America; Spock claimed only a "mild influence."
Philosophy of respect
Through it all, the big-boned, 6-foot-4 inch Spock said he never changed his basic philosophy on child care -- "to respect children because they're human beings and they deserve respect, and they'll grow up to be better people."
"But I've always said ask for respect from your children, ask for cooperation, ask for politeness. Give your children firm leadership."
Said Dr. Marvin Drellich, professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College: "Some physicians who have called him excessively permissive just didn't understand and gave his understanding approach to child rearing a negative label. He was blamed for the radical behavior of the youth in the '60s. But that didn't emerge from Spock's teachings. It was far more a reflection of the social and political climate."
Spock said he never meant that children should be allowed to be uncooperative or impolite.
In later years, he said he was becoming more moralistic. He said parents should give their children strong values and encourage them to help others.
"I've come to the realization that a lot of our problems are because of a dearth of spiritual values," he said in 1992.
Benjamin McLane Spock was born May 2, 1903, in New Haven, Connecticut, oldest of six children of a lawyer whose Dutch ancestors once spelled their names Spaak. He attended Yale University, where he joined the crew team and helped win a gold medal at the 1924 Olympics.
He decided on medicine after spending a summer as a counselor at a camp for crippled children. Following graduation from Yale, he took his medical degree at Columbia University and studied at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
From 1933 to 1943, he worked in private practice in New York City while teaching pediatrics at Cornell University.
Spock spent two years as a psychiatrist in the U.S. Naval Reserve Medical Corps and was discharged in 1946 as a lieutenant commander. At night, he worked on the exhaustively indexed book that disputed tomes advising parents not to kiss and hold their children.
He advised parents that it was better to feed babies when they wanted to eat rather than make both parent and baby unhappy by adhering to a strict schedule.
While he thought he made it clear that parents should be firm, later editions of the book, originally titled "The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care," stressed that children need standards and that parents also have a right to respect.
"Parents began to be afraid to impose on the child in any way," he said.
Later, at the behest of feminists, he revised the book to remove references to the baby as "he" and to the parent as "she."
In 1951, after four years teaching psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, Spock joined the University of Pittsburgh as professor of child development. In 1955, he joined the faculty of Case Western Reserve University. He wrote a column for nearly 30 years, first for Ladies Home Journal and later for Redbook.
Mixing politics, pediatrics
Spock first moved into the political limelight in 1962, warning of the possible hazards posed to children and nursing mothers by atmospheric nuclear testing. He was elected co-chairman of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.
The former political conservative also became a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, leading a march on the Pentagon in 1967.
He argued, "What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?"
"People have said, 'You've turned your back on pediatrics,'" Spock said in 1992. "I said, 'No. It took me until I was in my 60s to realize that politics was a part of pediatrics."
In June 1968, Spock was convicted in Boston and sentenced to two years in prison for conspiracy to aid, abet and counsel young men to avoid the draft. The verdict was reversed on appeal.
He ran for president in 1972 as a candidate of the Peoples Party, getting more than 75,000 votes.
He said no one accused him of being too permissive until the late 1960s, when he began to be criticized by the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale and Agnew.
In the 1970s, he wrote "Raising Children in a Difficult Time," which discussed such issues as drugs, contraception, and day care.
A later revision of "Baby and Child Care," included material on single parents, stepparents and divorce, something he learned of firsthand following his own divorce and remarriage.
In his later years, Spock traveled the nation, lecturing on child care, education and nuclear war, and spent his leisure time sailing off Maine or the Virgin Islands or rowing on a lake in Arkansas, his second wife's home state.
Just 2 1/2 weeks ago, Spock's wife, Mary Morgan, pleaded for help in paying Spock's $10,000-a-month medical bills.
Mellowed in later years
Spock's first marriage, in 1927 to the former Jane Cheney, ended in divorce after 48 years. They had two sons -- Michael, a museum director, and John, who studied architecture and became a construction company owner.
Spock, who described his own parents as strict but loving, reflected that he was probably too stern in raising his sons.
"I never kissed them," he once said. "Now when I see my sons, I throw my arms around them."
Spock married Morgan, almost 40 years his junior, in 1976.
He said later he became more easy-going, able to appear in public without the traditional three-piece suit with watch chain, and he took up a health food diet.
"I never leave his side," Morgan said last month. "And I'll never send him away to be cared for."
Spock once said that he would like a New Orleans-style funeral, with a jazz band accompanying the casket.
"I love to dance and I'd love to be saying goodbye to my friends while the band was playing and they were dancing," he said. "I want them to remember I was a dancing man in my day."
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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