Personality, Jul. 21, 1952

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SPOCK calls his lifework "preventive psychiatry." His book on baby care was conceived as a phase of that work and, like half a dozen other projects, was carried out in his spare time. He started it during a summer vacation and worked on it practically every night for two years, from nine until after midnight, dictating to his wife to give it an easy, conversational tone. He finished it after joining the Navy in 1944 as a psychiatrist in charge of severe disciplinary cases. When he got his overseas orders, the book had still to be indexed. The publishers urged him to leave the job to a professional, but Spock is a fussy man, and he felt he knew best what mothers would be looking for. So on the hot, week-long troop-train ride from New York to San Francisco, while a beer party flowed at one end of his Pullman and a petty officer noisily snored in the seat opposite, Lieut. Commander Spock patiently indexed away, his lap lost under galley proofs and long sheets which slowly filled up with 1,500 entries like "Bottle feeding—bubbling," and "Bedtime—keeping it happy." Part of Spock's drive stems, perhaps, from the fact that he was not a Spock baby himself. His father was a successful New Haven lawyer who resembled and respected Calvin Coolidge, and his mother was a forceful New England woman with strict views. She prides herself on having brought up her six children with toe-the-line discipline. "If all parents today were as strict as I was, we wouldn't have so many brats and little vandals," she says. Ben was seldom allowed to do what most other boys did, and he suffered accordingly. He and his younger sister Hitty were sent to a small fresh-air school where they sat in felt bags on cold days, emerging at intervals to warm themselves by folk dancing on a wooden platform. Even at ten Ben towered over his contemporaries, and his folk dancing was a favorite entertainment of the boys in the nearby public school, who came to the windows expressly to enjoy it. Ben was mortified, but not Mrs. Spock. "Don't pay any attention to them," she told him. "You know you are right." His unconventional and Spartan childhood apparently did Ben little harm, but he considers this no argument for inflicting the same kind of thing on others. "It's all right if you survive," he says. "Too many don't." He spent much of his boyhood cringing or running away from something, but his well-trained legs proved useful at Andover, where he made the track team and, in general, caught up with the rest of the boys. At Yale he was a social success. At medical school he rose to the head of his class. He was one of the first doctors to intern in both pediatrics and psychiatry.