Mencken Parenting Book Due for Re-Release, With Updates

Although newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken had no experience taking care of children, that didn’t stop him from writing a book in 1910 about babies.

The book, “What You Ought to Know About Your Baby,” will be reissued in November after an updating by two Baltimore doctors. One of them, Howard Markel, insists of the work that “most of (its) information is not only valuable for its time, but remains true.”

For more than a decade, Mencken told virtually no one about the book, which consisted of 15 essays on breast-feeding, bottle-feeding, sleep, general baby care and infectious diseases. It was published and given away from 1910 to 1923.

Those essays are the core of “The H.L. Mencken Baby Book,” which updates the medical advice in the earlier book and presents the unlikely tale of how Mencken, novelist Theodore Dreiser and Baltimore physician Leonard K. Hirshberg--three men with, collectively, almost no knowledge of children--came to produce a popular book of advice for the parents of 80 years ago.

Hirshberg provided the medical information. He brought Mencken together with Dreiser.

“The advice that Mencken and Hirshberg give on breast-feeding is just perfect,” Markel said in a recent interview. “I can’t (promote human milk) nearly as strongly as H. L. Mencken. I can’t say any woman who doesn’t breast-feed is not worthy of being called a woman.” But Mencken could, and did.

“The book’s strongest suit,” say Markel and co-author Frank Oski, “is that no other book in the fields of child care or medicine displays the acerbic and lively style of a writer as gifted as H. L. Mencken.”

Markel happened upon the early book by accident.

Markel thought he would write one article on the Mencken work. But the project “just snowballed” into a much larger work and, eventually, the small Philadelphia publishing company, Hanley & Belfus, beeped him in the emergency room one day to say that it wanted the book.

Oski, director of Johns Hopkins Hospital Children’s Center here and chairman of the pediatrics department at the Johns Hopkins medical school, encouraged Markel from the beginning and updated the answers to questions that follow each essay. Each question carries a 1910 and a 1989 answer.

The original book does not mention Mencken. “Mencken made a point of not telling anybody until the late ‘20s. He gave a few copies to some close friends but he always signed in the flyleaf ‘the fact that I have written this has, to my knowledge, never gotten out,’ ” Markel says.

The new book adds commentary and historical perspective to the original work.

Markel and Oski say the book is “replete with obsolete ideas, but it also offers some excellent advice for mothers even today.”