A little more than a year ago, Maine lost one of its most famous summer folk when Dr. Benjamin Spock sold his Camden home to carry on his fight against failing health and mounting medical bills. On Monday, the world lost one of its most inspiring citizens, a shining example of a life fully lived. He was 94.

“Trust yourself. You know more than you think.” That short phrase was the nut of the doctor’s landmark 1946 book, “Baby and Child Care,” the book that has sold more than 50 million copies, second only to the Bible. And like the Bible, Spock’s words all too often have been misused and taken out of context, causing considerable mischief.

The good doctor did not, as many critics came to assert, condone permissiveness, he did not cause Baby Boom parents to create a generation of spoiled brats, of “Spock-marked” hippies. As he urged parents to follow their best instincts and their hearts, he also urged them to set standards, to establish values.

“I’ve always said: Ask for respect from your children, ask for cooperation, ask for politeness,” he said in one of the countless interviews he gave to set the misinterpreted record straight. “Give your children firm leadership.” Parents who failed to do that learned the hard way what happens when one doesn’t read past the introduction.

Here’s the basic Benjamin McLane Spock resume: Gold medal rower at the 1924 Olympics; practicing pediatrician; U.S. Navy medical officer during World War II; college professor; columnist; author; the first to warn of the hazards atmospheric nuclear testing in the 1960s posed to nursing infants; an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War; a member of the Boston Five, convicted in 1968 of conspiring to abet draft resisters (a judgment later overturned); a name on Spiro Agnew’s enemies list; a 1972 presidential candidate.

In the last 20 years of his remarkable life, Dr. Spock revised his famous book a few times, adding information on single-parenting, step-parenting, divorce and child care. He continued to lecture throughout the world on child raising, education and nuclear war. He began answering parenting questions on the Internet, despite not being entirely sure just what the Internet was or how it worked. As an old man, regretting that he never showed affection for his own children, he began to hug the stuffing out of his two adult sons every chance he got. At the end, he knew more than he thought he did because he never stopped learning. It was a life that’s a book in itself.