Dr. Eli Newberger, pioneer in child abuse detection, dies at age 83

As an older brother in a troubled family, Eli’s role quietly shifted from child to de facto guardian. “He was really the parental figure to his two younger siblings,” he said his wife Carolyn Newbergera psychologist, flautist and artist.

Dr. Newberger, founder of the Child Protection Team and Family Development Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, died Oct. 24. He was 83 and lived in Lenox, having spent much of his life in Brookline.

In 1997, he was a key witness in the trial of British au pair Louise Woodward, who was initially found guilty of second-degree murder. the death of Matthew Eappen of Newton. A judge subsequently reduced Woodward’s conviction to involuntary manslaughter.

By this time, Dr. Newberger considered an expert in this field. By his late 20s, he was already respected for his ability to identify which young patients had been abused when the Children’s Hospital asked him to set up a child abuse unit.

The team of physicians, nurses and social workers he assembled in the early 1970s became an interdisciplinary inspiration for similar programs in hospitals across the country.

His many publications include the 1999 book “The Men They Will Become: The Nature and Nurture of Male Character.”

“Eli’s impact on the well-being of children is significant,” said Randal Rucker, former CEO of Family Service of Greater Boston.

“Eli always emphasized the need to bring our expertise together for the benefit of the children who have been harmed, to help prevent harm in the first place, and – when terrible things happened – to support that child, to help that child to help heal, and to work with them. the families too,” Rucker said.

While pioneering medical approaches to identifying and preventing child abuse, Dr. Newberger also established himself internationally as an improvising jazz tuba player.

He performed locally throughout Europe and recorded numerous albums, mainly with the New Black Eagle Jazz Band, which he co-founded in the early 1970s. Dr. Newberger also performed with many other musicians and performed in later years his New Orleans-style ensemble Eli & the Hot Six.

“He is super known as a jazz tuba player,” he said Mike Roylance, principal tuba with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who performed with Dr. Newberger and admired him.

As a jazz improviser, “he would quote little tunes from musicals, or Beethoven, or a Shostakovich string quartet,” Roylance said.

“He had the ability to bring intelligence to music,” Roylance said. “His tone was rich, velvety and warm. It was always beautiful and enveloping.”

Jazz and his medical work were with Dr. Newberger were closely linked, and each helped make the other endeavor possible.

“The joy and liberation of this musical life has enabled me to cope with the hardships of child abuse and domestic violence,” he told the Boston Globe in 2015when his 75th birthday celebration included a performance with Eli and the Hot Six at the Scullers Jazz Club in Cambridge. “My medical life taps into the sense of shared struggle and social protest that runs deep in the history and practice of jazz.”

Dr. Newberger was born in Brooklyn, NY, on December 26, 1940 and raised in Mount Vernon, NY

The empathy and compassion he later brought to abused children “started with this tremendous feeling of being a teenager and taking care of his younger siblings,” his wife said.

“He was a great older brother in every sense of the word,” said Dr.’s younger brother. Newberger, Henry of Coram, NY.

Their father, Joseph Newberger, was an accountant who divorced their mother, Helen Farber Newberger, whose care was Dr. Newberger and his wife cared for many years.

While attending high school in Mount Vernon, Dr. Newberger also took lessons from William Bell, principal tuba player with the New York Philharmonic. Bell lent Eli a horn at a time when he was playing gigs as a jazz pianist to save money for college.

Dr. Newberger also studied piano and organ at the Juilliard School, and he studied music theory and composition at Yale University, while also taking pre-med courses.

He met on a blind date Carolyn Moore, a Sarah Lawrence College student. They married in 1962, a week before he graduated.

She became a child psychologist with a career at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he taught in addition to his work at Children’s.

“We were really partners in our lives together because we were 19 when we met,” she said. “We grew up together.”

Carolyn taught first-year students to cover the costs of his Yale School of Medicine. After graduating, he joined the Peace Corps during the Vietnam War. She was pregnant at the time with their daughter Mary-Helen Nsangou, who now lives in Brookline.

His Peace Corps service took them to Africa and Upper Volta, what is now Burkina Faso, where he discovered pediatrics was his calling.

Dr. Newberger was “a person of tremendous moral and intellectual curiosity and interest,” Carolyn said.

Whenever Eli was faced with a challenge or problem at work, at home or with music, “Eli’s first response was always, ‘I’m going to solve that,’ and he did.”

In addition to his wife, daughter and brother, Dr. Newberger is survived by two grandchildren.

A gathering to celebrate his life and work will be announced.

Dr. Newberger delighted audiences wherever he performed.

In a 1986 New York Times review of duets he recorded with banjoist Jimmy Mazzy, John S. Wilson wrote that Dr. Newberger “was often surprisingly light and lyrical, as it sings melodies softly over the background of the banjo.”

Wilson called one album a “tour de force” and noted that Dr. Newberger performed Gershwin’s Prelude in C-sharp minor in “a duet with himself while playing the tuba valves with one hand and the piano with the other.”

During their years living in the Berkshires part-time, and then in full-time retirement, Dr. Newberger and his wife are increasingly focusing on the Kids 4 Harmony program the agency 18 Degrees, Family Services for Western Massachusetts, who honored the couple in July.

Kids 4 Harmony is inspired by El Sistema, a Venezuelan music education program that uses the motto ‘music for social change’.

Dr. Newberger “believed so strongly that music could have a positive impact on children in need,” Roylance said.

From personal experience, Dr. Newberger that music could help people survive difficulties and challenges.

“I consider myself both a musician and a doctor. My life has been a constant balancing act, with music sometimes serving as a counterbalance to medicine, and sometimes the other way around.” Dr. Newberger wrote in “The Medicine of the Tuba,” an essay posted on his website.

“Music keeps me in touch with the emotional basis of life,” he added. “It allows me to care.”

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Bryan Marquard can be reached at [email protected].