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Historical Bibliography Updated: June 17, 2026

What you ought to know about your baby by Leonard Keene Hirshberg. A text book for mothers on the care and feeding of babies, with questions and answers especially prepared by the editor.

Publication Details

New York: The Butterick Publishing Company, 1910 CE.

Ghost-written by American journalist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English H. L. Mencken except for the "questions and answers." In a copy that sold at auction at Christies in 1995, Mencken inscribed the following: "I found Hirshberg. He prepared the material and I wrote the copy. More than 125,000 American mothers, using this invaluable text, have saved their brats from smallpox, arterio-sclerosis, poison-vol and delirium tremors. This has been my sole contribution to the salvation of humanity."  Digital facsimile from the Hathi Trust at this link. New edition as The H. L. Mencken baby book edited by Howard Markel and Frank Oski (Philadelphia, 1990).

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Thematic Classifications

Catalog MetadataReference Information
Entry Number#8710
Permanent Linkhttps://staging.historyofmedicine.com/entry/10888
Author Bio LinkWikipedia ↗
External URLwhat-you-ought-to-know-about-your-baby-by-leonard-keene-hirshberg-a-text-book-for-mothers-on-the-care-and-feeding-of-babies-with-questions-and-answers-especially-prepared-by-the-editor

Geographic Context

Publication place: New York

Mentioned in annotation: Philadelphia