Love him or loathe him, it cannot be denied that Spock had an immense influence upon the attitudes and opinions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Born into a fairly large family he was expected to help bring up his five younger brothers and sisters and it is possibly that which gave him an early interest in child rearing, and after graduating as top of his class at medical school he trained first of all as a paediatrician and then as a psychiatrist and so it was perhaps only natural that he should develop his own very strong views on child psychology. After spending the early part of his life as a psychiatrist in the US Navy he took up professorships at a number of universities; well-paid jobs no doubt but they could not have prepared him for the riches that he was going to earn as an author of his book "The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" which sold more than 50 million copies worldwide! So what was so different in this book that made so many people want to buy it?

Spock proposed an entirely different way for mothers to relate to their children than the one that was currently fashionable. It had been the norm to point out that we live in a less than perfect world and so people have to be strong mentally as well as physically in order to survive and prosper and so it was considered to be a sensible principle to teach babies and children from the earliest age that they had to have parental discipline, self-discipline and patience. To teach them these it was usual for rigid rules to be laid down for their routine; they were expected to feed at certain times, sleep a fixed number of hours at regular intervals, and if they cried to be fed or picked up they should be ignored in order to impress upon them that we cannot all have what we want when we want it. Spock overturned all these teachings and encouraged a closer bond between mother and child, with a mother treating her baby as an individual who needed to be treated in an individual manner rather than be subjected to an arbitrary routine. All of a sudden mothers all over the world were rushing to their children as soon as they started to cry, picking them up and cuddling them and doing everything possible to make the child happy and contented.

So what was the effect of all this? Critics have blamed the whole civil disobedience programmes of the 1960s and 1970s on parents who had brought up their children using Spock's guidelines to be rebellious wastrels who refused to stand on their own two feet. What didn't help of course was Spock's own involvement in the anti-war protests during the Vietnamese war and his promotion of permissive attitudes towards such contentious subjects as homosexuality, abortion and drugs and he was eventually arrested and convicted and sentenced to two years imprisonment on a charge of conspiring to encourage young people to avoid the draft, but he appealed against this successfully. This did however have a considerable impact upon his medical career.

Was he right or wrong? Certainly considerable doubts have been raised about one particular aspect of his teachings about how to bring up children; he advocated that a baby should never be left to sleep lying on its back, in case it vomited and choked up on it and so millions of people worldwide left our babies sleeping on their abdomens. Unfortunately this coincided with a considerable increase in so called "Sudden Infant Death Syndrome" and it was estimated by a researcher that around 50,000 infant deaths have been directly caused by the advice that Spock had given. Fair comment, or a libel?

Spock made a great deal of money out of his books but sadly when he died there was little of it left; he had battled a long while against cancer, and medical bills swallowed up most of his money.