Personality, Jul. 21, 1952

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But it looked in 1933 as though no one wanted a pediatrician with or without psychiatry. For several years Spock failed to make enough money to pay his Manhattan office rent. Then, one by one, patients came, and both mothers and children throve on the friendliness and reassurance of the young doctor who was as interested in finding out how a boy got along with his new baby sister as he was in giving inoculations. He was something of a presence, especially to little girls. "When he patted the glands in your throat, you felt you'd been blessed," one ex-patient remembers with a sigh. He wore a business suit rather than a white coat which might seem strange to little children, and he made a game of their regular checkups—designing a special structure up which they willingly scrambled to be on and thumped. His enormous practice wasn't built on gadgets, however, but on a simpler secret: that it's just as important to give mothers confidence as it is to give them advice.

A little boy, for example, may stop wetting the bed if his mother can talk out her fears to the doctor and become convinced that she's doing an important job well.

DR. SPOCK no longer takes private patients. A year ago he became Professor of Child Development in the medical school of the University of Pittsburgh, with a free hand to inject a shot of child psychiatry wherever he can in the city. Directly or indirectly, he reaches thousands of children in schools, clinics, and hospitals. He likes to work with only a few people at a time, and can often be found in a basement room of a city public-health center, sitting in a circle of painted wooden chairs with a dozen a workers, nurses, doctors and interns, balancing a coffee cup on his knee and discussing why one child doesn't get along well in school or why another catches so many colds.

Some doctors point out that much of his advice is intuitive, since little is known about the emotional life of children. A few mothers complain that he makes things sound too easy. But the book sales click along as steadily as the birth rate, and Dr. Spock gets a daily drift of thank-you letters from grateful parents. Their children have yet to be heard from.