Significant Others - Malcolm Gladwell on Dr. Spock

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Best-selling author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell joins Liza to discuss the concept of “celebrity doctors” and the destructive dynamic between the famous Dr. Spock and his complicated wife Jane.

Welcome back to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien. And in yesterday's episode, we learned about Jane Cheney Spock, who helped her husband, Dr. Benjamin Spock, craft his landmark childcare book, but whose life was essentially undone by its success. To talk more about the influence of media and medical experts on American culture, I'm thrilled to welcome bestselling author and host of the delightful podcast, Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm, thank you so much for joining us. The reason I thought to reach out to you about this episode is because I heard an episode of your podcast, Revisionist History, that talked about Will and Grace, the TV show, and how

subversively influential it was. Everyone should take a listen to that episode because it's really great. But to summarize, Will & Grace was not what we might think of as serious media because it was just a network sitcom, but it had a profound and measurable effect on politics in our country. You give a statistic that public support of gay marriage more than doubled from the beginning of the show's run until the end. In a similar way, Dr. Spock introduced Freudian developmental concepts to much of the world under the cover sort of of advice for new moms and over time for dads too. Are there other examples like this that come to mind for you in terms of a person who had a vast impact on the culture in a way that was kind of under the radar?

Well, it's funny. When I was reading the script you guys sent me about Dr. Spock, I thought of this guy, John Rock, who I had, I actually did a podcast on John Rock, but also wrote about him for The New Yorker. He's the guy who did all the clinical work around the birth control pill. He's really the father of the birth control pill. Wow. And he was this Catholic doctor in Boston, devoutly Catholic, who believed what he was doing in his work developing the pill was, A, in keeping with his Catholic faith. But more than that, he felt that he was liberating. I mean, he understood the extent to which he was liberating women from the consequences of unwanted pregnancies. from the consequences of unwanted pregnancies. And he was thinking about,

he would go into these tenements in Boston and see these women who were 30 years old and looked like they were 60 and had eight children and they couldn't feed any of them. Right. And that's what he was thinking about. But what's interesting is that he's similar in many ways to Benjamin Spock, which is that he is, first of all, they're physically the same. They're both these tall kind of rocks, not waspy.

But, you know, he looked the part. And he had a kind of following in the exact same era. If you had asked Americans in the 60s to name the three doctors they knew, they would have said Jonas Salk, John Rock, and Benjamin Spock. So akin to a Fauci type of a person. Yeah, a kind of. And these guys, the group is actually a little bit larger. There was another man named Ansel Keys, who was the other person I thought of. Again, same era, again, this kind of a celebrity doctor scientist. He was the person who brought the Mediterranean

diet to America. He wrote best-selling books and was on the cover of Time. They're all in this kind of mid-century era where a group of these sort of charismatic men of science are taking science to the public

in a way that it had never been taken to the public before. Is that an American phenomenon, the celebrity doctor, or is it a modern phenomenon? Is it something that you see anywhere else at any other time? Well, so Ansel Keys, who's at the University of Minnesota after the war, just before and after the war, he's often referred to as the first celebrity doctor. Now, I don't know. I haven't kind of investigated whether this is true, but it does seem like there is a kind of the rise of middle-brow media culture, Time Magazine, Life Magazine, these ideas, this notion of these thoughtful, reasonably sophisticated media publications that were designed for the first generation in history. This was the first kind of highly educated, reasonably sophisticated mass generation in history.

That's what time and life were all about, right? They were reaching that person who was the first person in their family to have a college degree. And all of these people, you know, Spock is talking about, he's taking Freudian ideas and repackaging them for the general public. I'm not even sure you could do that today. I don't think so either. No, and he was smart enough never to name Freud because people were so terrified of Freud for some good reasons. and getting people to reflect on what they eat for the first time. And John Rock is saying you can actually alter your own personal physiology and fundamentally change your role as a woman.

These are all like, it's all happening in exactly the same period, and it's kind of dramatic. Right. It also, the biographer that Meyer, who wrote the book that I used for most of this research for this episode, makes the point that this idea that, you know, after winning the war and beating the Nazis, Americans sort of are like, we can make, we can fix things. We can make the world better. We can do it one baby at a time, or we can do it one, you know, woman at a time if you're sort of you know taking charge of your reproduction and that that seems to fit too and right alongside the you know the what you're talking about in terms of the the general populace being either having a higher education level and also maybe aspiring to that it feels like there was a an aspiration toward intellectualism or

some version of that, that especially right now sort of feels to be falling out of favor in large sectors of our population. Yeah, you're right. In all of these three cases, this is a generation that's anxious to put some distance between their own practices and the practices of their parents. Right. Right. It's this sort of explicit rejection of the traditions that you inherited and this idea that you can remake your world.

And that's really stuck with us, I think. I feel that that's actually one of the things that's getting maybe hammered out of place for a lot of people right now is this sense of eternal progression, right? That every generation is going to be better than the one that came before it. And my generation, I'm generation X. And so we were the first ones when we were in our 20s to start hearing those rumbles of,

you might be the first generation not to succeed beyond what your parents have. And we didn't like that. So we said, oh, we don't think so. We don't think that's true. And of course it has turned out to be sadly the beginning of a different trend. But it does feel like such a resonant American message that we can all go make it better. And one of the other things you mentioned and now this is a follow-up to your podcast episode, but is that TV was such a moderating medium. And I'm wondering now with

the fracturing of media in general, are there still moderating media that are largely consumed? Or do you think that's something that's kind of shifting out of the center of our culture? There certainly isn't a kind of pool of shared cultural experiences that's gone. I was thinking, this is actually very relevant to these people we're talking about, Spock. The thing about Spock is that makes him so powerful is that it wasn't that one family down the block were followers of Spock and no one else were. They were these lonely outposts of child-rearing innovation. followers of Spock and no one else were. They were these lonely outposts of child-rearing innovation. You did it because everybody was, like, it was a mass, it was a set of ideas that spread far and wide. Every mother in your group would be reading Spock and following Spock.

That's why it was so possible for people to make this transformation in the way they thought about child-rearing, because they felt comfortable being part of this uh a group and that's a very it's a very kind of um alien notion from us today that you would make a change in your life and everyone would be making the same change simultaneously now we're so used to the idea that everything is fractured and it's one little group over here that does, believes this and another group over there that does, that believes that. There just wasn't any, the same kind of expectation of division. Were you a Spock baby?

I guess I was. So I was born in 63 and almost certainly my mother read. In fact, I remember my mother talking about Dr. Spock. So I guess I am. I mean, she was not as, I think she benefited greatly from that kind of everything's going to be okay kind of. I mean, I think that you would know far more about this than me, but I suspect that the popular understanding of Spock and what Spock said, there's a gap between those two. And by the time it filters down to people, you know, to moms sort

of in the field, I think a lot of it is just like, stop worrying so much. That's how Spock was explained to me as a child. He was the guy who said you didn't have to worry so much. That's how Spock was explained to me as a child. He was the guy who said you didn't have to worry that much. Right. In terms of, you know, Dr. Spock wasn't quite a Jekyll and Hyde. You know, he wasn't that extremely different in private, but he was markedly different. He was, you know, not the kindly, just trust yourself and don't overthink it kind of message giver. He was very uptight. He was very awkward with his children. He was a particularly brutal match for his wife in a lot of ways. And we talked a little bit about the sort of context of the mid-century, and that has so many ramifications. But in terms of the way that a man, I guess, would tend to be a husband to his

wife who was very supportive of his work, how typical does their story seem to you? And how much does it seem as if maybe there was, you know, something a little bit more punitive almost going on with this particular couple? I know that's sort of a lot of speculation and kind of a hard question to answer, but. demons that she's cracked um but that idea like a lot of this is just about the frustration of of the not just a mid-century woman but but you know you have a several generations in a row of women who are educated or at least exposed to the to the wider world but have no ability to make good on that you know that's right my my mother is a member of that generation but she gets the chance in her 50s she goes back to school and gets a msw and then has a career like a sort of second career um but you had that generation you know she didn't get to start her

career 22 she started it at 52 right that's the and her own mother who knows what her own mother would have been right doing she was a school teacher but never got a chance to do you know to kind of flex her muscles in the in the in the wider world so there's i don't know whether you can't i mean i i feel sorry for them both in a sense that it would be very difficult for Benjamin Spock to kind of solve the larger puzzle that society had created for his marriage, which was there's no kind of model for giving his wife her proper due. Although, having said that, I suddenly remembered, do you remember, you're, I suspect, much younger than me.

Not that much. Really not that much. There was a historian, a couple called Will and Ariel Durant, who wrote in the 50s and 60s, these enormously popular histories. And they wrote them as a couple. But it was always sort of a striking thing about them. They were like Doris Kearns Goodwin on steroids, basically. They sold kajillions of books in this era. And what was striking about them is that they were a husband and wife team. And no one presumed that the husband was the dominant party

and the wife was the... They were a team. So that was the beginning of a kind of, there were just the beginnings of this notion that you could have a model in popular culture for a woman and a man as being, or a husband and a wife as being equal partners in some kind of creative endeavor. And it just doesn't quite happen fast enough for Mrs. Spock, right? She's just a kind of behind the wave. Yeah. Also, I do feel that he, you know, I always have that question of how much of greatness requires putting up with some unpleasantness, you know, that he had this sort of outsized ability to be generous and caring to his patients and to mothers in general. And,

you know, is there necessary, is it possible that he also could have been that even handed and, and thoughtful in his own personal life, you know, that like, it's not necessarily going to be balanced because it takes an enormous amount of energy to do both of those things. And they feel almost as much like an unfortunate accidental match as anything, because I think if she hadn't been as afflicted as she was by her addiction illness and her mental health issues that she might have been able to advocate for herself a little bit better. But, you know, there's, I don't know, I find my mother is an MSW also. She, I think, would have preferred to be a doctor and that was where she was held up. So she was a little bit further ahead of your grandmother, certainly, and maybe a half step

ahead of your mother in terms of she got her MSW degree while she had little kids. But given her druthers, she probably would have been a psychiatrist from the get-go. And it is really tricky. It is really tricky to, you know, it's not anyone's fault. It's just really tricky to figure out how to have a big career and have children. And some people figure it out and other people struggle with it, but having the option is everything. And're still still working on that often um i have one more question for you which you do not have to answer but uh some people enjoy it which is in terms of your life's work do you is there a person who you would call a significant other in terms of opening a particular door for you or setting a particular fire that, you know, led you to where you are now.

Oh, you mean using that in that term in the way that you seem to be using, which is anyone who's plays a quiet role in the. Yeah, it doesn't even have to be quiet, but just someone, if not for them, things would be different, which is said about a lot of people. But if there's one who looms large. Yeah. I mean, there's many answers to that, but one in particular was my editor at The New Yorker, where I spent 10 years, was a man named Henry Fender, who is little known, but was enormously influential in developing the careers of, I mean, an entire generation of New Yorker

writers. He still had the New Yorker. And was unusual as an editor in that he didn't, at least with me, he never changed anything. So he wouldn't touch your, he would read what you did, but he wouldn't touch anything. He would just tell you, often not in a terribly direct way, what he thought you needed to do. So it was the first time I'd ever encountered an editing which had as its explicit purpose the development of my skill, as opposed to the editor superimposing his insights on top of mine. Here was someone whose only interest was in teaching me how to do a better job the next time. And I used to always refer to what I called my internal fender, which was the internal fender was after, you know,

five years of being edited by Henry, you knew what he was going to say before he said it. And that was the point of his, he'd gotten inside your head and was permanently improving things without having to say anything at all. So that was like kind of genius. And I feel like he was the person who took me from, I mean, my development as a writer was immeasurably aided by this, he's incredibly quiet, shy, brilliant guy who would just murmur a few, you know, here's a few, I thought of this, or I didn't know something around here doesn't work, that kind of thing. That turns out to be the greatest. For the first year, you're baffled,

and then by year three, you're like, oh, okay, that's genius. When it sticks with you forever, that's a sure sign. I am so appreciative of this. It's been a pleasure to talk to you, and I hope I get to see you again soon. Yeah, I really enjoyed this. Thank you, Malcolm Gladwell, for joining us. And be sure to listen to Revisionist History wherever you get your podcasts. And that's it for this season of Significant Others.

These stories have been a joy to tell. I sure learned a lot and I hope you have too. Thanks to everyone who sent in episode suggestions. Please keep them coming by emailing significantpod at gmail.com. And for me and everyone at Team Coco, thanks so much for listening.