Rethinking Dr. Spock
Year: 2011
Type: letter
Abstract: I read with interest the “Voices From the Past” article that reprinted part of Dr. Spock's book, Decent and Indecent: Our Personal and Political Behavior.1 The accompanying brief biography of Dr. Spock was intriguing as well—we should all aspire to speak so vocally and publicly about issues pertaining to health and social justice in the United States.
However, I think that it is inappropriate to present a biography—however brief—on Dr. Spock that references his best-selling book on child care, Baby and Child Care,2 as a “classic parenting guide,” yet fails to mention that this very book was the first to promote prone sleeping for infants. As we know in retrospect, prone sleeping drastically increases a baby's risk of dying of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Dr. Spock's book was not the only popular book to advocate prone sleeping at the time, but further revisions continued to make the recommendation nine years after solid epidemiological evidence had accumulated regarding the increased risk of SIDS for babies being placed on their stomachs for sleep.3
In a 2005 meta-analysis of SIDS, Gilbert et al. estimated that, between the 1950s and the early 1990s, over 60 000 infant deaths worldwide “were attributable to harmful health advice [i.e. advice favoring prone sleeping].”3 Dr. Spock's book was not only the first publication to advocate prone sleeping, it was also by far the most popular, selling 50 million copies worldwide in 42 languages.1
Antiwar and antinuclear proliferation efforts are certainly something about which we, as public health professionals, should concern ourselves, but in Dr. Spock's case, his exemplary social justice history is tempered by his poor judgment in recommending—without any scientific evidence to support him—the prone sleep position to millions of unsuspecting parents.
Author: Marit L. Bovbjerg
Institution: Oregon State University
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2044130471