The New Yorker:

Fifty years in the life of a book and the American family.

By Ann Hulbert
May 12, 1996

Dr. Benjamin Spock, who is ninety-three, has been the pediatrician on perpetual house call for millions of American families over the past half century. His “Baby and Child Care” was published in May of 1946, has been revised five times, and has sold more than forty-three million copies. Today, Dr. Spock’s own house is a twenty-two-foot cream-colored Winnebago named the Tortoise, parked in the yard of friends in Miami, where Spock and his second wife, Mary Morgan, spend half the year. Until 1992, they lived on the Carapace, a thirty-five-foot sailboat, but they sold it when Spock’s footing became less sure on deck, and because they wanted to be in closer touch with his doctors. Spock, who has worn a pacemaker since he had a heart attack nine years ago and who suffered a brief stroke-like episode six years ago, has also taken his health into his own hands. Or, rather, Mary Morgan, who is fifty-two, has taken it into hers. Every day, she devotes many hours to preparing macrobiotic meals for the two of them in their tiny kitchen. On the refrigerator door hangs a child’s drawing with the caption “Dr Spk is a vare anyoosurl dkr.”

One evening recently, the Doctor and Morgan entertained a female acupuncturist named Sachi at a restaurant in Coconut Grove. Dr. Spock had a cold, and Sachi had spent that afternoon pounding his back, applying needles, and practicing yoga with him. During dinner, Dr. Spock, the friendly New Englander (his “mahvellous” is full of patrician folksiness), left the New Age talk mostly to the women, and hungrily turned to the meal that Morgan had ordered specially for him. His wife extolled the curative powers of the arugula, the sea vegetable, and the kale. Sachi serenely said that she could see all the food sparkling with energy, and that she had prayed to her swordfish before biting into him. “I could just tell somehow it was a he,” she commented, and Morgan agreed, saying, “I saw him in the kitchen and he had a very masculine eye.” Dr. Spock, teasing in a slightly tense-jawed way, remarked that the two of them could be taken for nuts, and kept on eating.

Go to link