He developed a wide variety of procedures and devices to reattach or replace vital body parts, including the first inflatable prosthetic penis.Berish Strauch, a plastic surgeon whose pioneering procedures and devices to reattach or replace vital body parts included one of the first toe-to-thumb transplants, a device to reverse vasectomies and, perhaps most notably, the first inflatable prosthetic penis, died on Dec. 24 in Greenwich, Conn. He was 90.His daughter, Laurie Strauch Weiss, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was respiratory failure.Beginning in the late 1960s, Dr. Strauch was at the forefront of a revolution in plastic surgery, in particular microsurgery, in which doctors use microscopes and precision instruments to sew together minuscule blood vessels, nerves and ligaments, some thinner than a human hair, said Dr. June K. Wu, an associate professor of surgery at Columbia University who completed her residency under Dr. Strauch.As the longtime chief of reconstructive surgery at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, Dr. Strauch devised many of the surgical procedures and technologies that are now considered commonplace. Among other achievements, he pioneered techniques to remove excess skin from patients who had lost significant amounts of weight from bariatric surgery — a sort of extreme tummy tuck.After a New York City firefighter lost his thumb in 1976, Dr. Strauch tried to reattach it. When that proved impossible, he suggested something more radical: taking one of the man’s big toes and sewing it in place of the severed digit.Not only did the surgery work, but within a few months, the firefighter was back on the job.Dr. Strauch, far left, at a workshop and symposium on microvascular surgery in New York City in 1974.via Laurie Strauch Weiss“I don’t recommend a transplant for a person who has lost a finger,” he told the newspaper Midnight in 1976. “A thumb, yes, because the opposable thumb is what differentiates us from beasts.”Dr. Strauch was among the first modern surgeons to use leeches to help control blood flow after surgery and remove necrotic tissue — a seemingly medieval technique that, he said, could not be improved upon by human innovation.“If you had to go out and design an instrument to remove blood,” he told The New York Times in 1987, “you couldn’t design one that was more suited than the biblical leech.”He left an especially deep mark on the field of urology. He created the so-called Strauch clamp, a device used to assist in reversing vasectomies. And in perhaps his most remarkable but no less important innovation, he invented the first inflatable penile prosthesis.Artificial penises had been in use for centuries, either as replacements for detached members, as treatment for erectile dysfunction or for use in sex reassignment surgery. But in most cases they were either permanently flaccid or permanently erect — neither of which was an especially satisfying arrangement for anyone involved.Dr. Strauch devised a prosthetic penis attached by a tube to a reservoir of fluid implanted inside the body. When the patient wanted an erection, he could activate a pump to fill the prosthesis (though to reverse it, he would need to work the fluid back into the reservoir manually).He received a patent for his invention in 1973, after which he sold it to a company called American Medical Systems. One of the company’s founders, F. Brantley Scott, then further developed the product — and in the annals of medical history has since received most of the credit.Berish Strauch was born on Sept. 19, 1933, in the Bronx, the son of Herman and Anna (Weiss) Strauch. His father cut men’s suits in Manhattan’s garment district; his mother was a milliner.As a child, Berish, who went by Bob in informal situations, accompanied his parents to their work. He later said that watching them wield scissors and knives for hours inspired his interest in surgery.He attended the Bronx High School of Science and graduated from Columbia, where he studied pre-med, in 1955 and from its medical school in 1959. After fellowships at Roosevelt Hospital in New York and Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., he returned to the Bronx to join the staff at Montefiore. He became chief of plastic surgery there in 1978.Dr. Strauch married Rena Feuerstein in 1955. She died just eight weeks before he did. Along with their daughter, he is survived by their son, Robert, himself a noted hand surgeon; seven grandchildren; and his sister, Renee Freed. The Strauchs lived in Rye, N.Y.Though he never sought attention, Dr. Strauch played a minor but important role in one of the biggest tabloid stories of the 1990s.Mary Jo Buttafuoco, third from right, with her husband, Joey, at a news conference in Mineola, N.Y., in 1992. When she suffered massive facial damage after being shot in the head, Dr. Strauch performed extensive surgery and returned most of her face to normal.Michael Alexander/Associated PressIn 1992 Amy Fisher, a teenager from Long Island, shot a woman named Mary Jo Buttafuoco in the side of the head after confronting her over Ms. Fisher’s affair with Mrs. Buttafuoco’s husband, Joey.Mrs. Buttafuoco survived, but she suffered massive facial damage, including partial paralysis. Hearing about her case, Dr. Strauch reached out to her lawyer and offered to help.“This is one of the most fruitful areas of medicine,” he told Newsday in 1992. “In the past 20 years there has been a whole new level of knowledge.”He performed extensive surgery on Mrs. Buttafuoco in early 1993, returning most of her face to normal — though it was too late to reverse extensive nerve damage.“She will still have some elements of the paralysis primarily of the lower lip,” he told Newsday after the surgery. “But she’s a beautiful lady, and she’s going to look great.”

His innovations in the use of drugs to prevent organ rejection helped bring a remarkable increase in the one-year survival rate.Roy Calne, a British surgeon whose work on organ transplantation helped turn what was once considered impossible into a lifesaving procedure for millions of people around the world, died on Jan. 6 at a retirement home in Cambridge, England. He was 93.His son Russell Calne said he died from heart failure.There are groundbreaking surgeons and groundbreaking researchers, but very few people are both. Dr. Calne (pronounced “kahn”) was an exception: He developed and practiced many of the operating techniques involved in transplantation, while at the same time working to identify what drugs would get the body to accept a new organ.The son of an automobile mechanic from the suburbs of London, Dr. Calne had long wondered why damaged organs, like faulty carburetors, couldn’t be swapped out for new ones. But as a student in the early 1950s, he was told repeatedly that it could never be done.He persevered, though, researching in his spare time as an anatomy instructor at the University of Oxford and later as a professor and the first chairman of the surgery department at the University of Cambridge.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? 

For over 40 years, he and his organization, the Health Research Group, held government and manufacturers to account for unsafe medication.Sidney M. Wolfe, a physician and consumer advocate who for more than 40 years hounded the pharmaceutical industry and the Food and Drug Administration over high prices, dangerous side effects and overlooked health hazards, bringing a new level of transparency and accountability to the world of medical care, died on Monday at his home in Washington. He was 86.His wife, Suzanne Goldberg, said the cause was a brain tumor.Along with the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, Dr. Wolfe founded the Health Research Group in 1971, and over the next four decades used it as a base for his relentless campaigns on behalf of health care users. At the door to his office, on the seventh floor of a dingy building near Dupont Circle in Washington, he hung a sign that read “Populus iamdudum defutatus est” — Latin for, roughly, “The people have been screwed long enough.”His strategy, built around what he called “research-based advocacy,” was to flood the zone with information: news releases, congressional testimonies and interviews in the news media. A visitor to his office would invariably come away with a stack of reports recently issued by the Health Research Group.Dr. Wolfe’s first effort, a few months before officially founding the group, was to write a letter with Mr. Nader to the F.D.A. about contamination in bags of intravenous fluid manufactured by Abbott Laboratories — and then to release the letter to the news media. Within two days, some two million bags had been recalled.Dr. Wolfe, partly obscured at center, appeared with his fellow consumer advocate Ralph Nader, right, in a news conference in Philadelphia in 1971. They were joined by Anthony Mazzocchi, a labor leader.Associated PressThe IV case “led me to think that there were an awful lot of problems that had been well documented, but no one had done anything about them,” he told The Washington Post in 1989.Soon after their success with Abbott, Dr. Wolfe and Mr. Nader found themselves flooded with tips and leaks from doctors and researchers in the government and industry. In response they created the Health Research Group, an offshoot of Mr. Nader’s organization, Public Citizen.Over his long tenure at the group Dr. Wolfe managed to get more than a dozen drugs removed from the market, and warning labels affixed to dozens of others. He took on more than just drugs — among his targets were contact lenses, pacemakers, tampons, cigarettes and toothpaste, anything that might touch on health and health care.He wrote a monthly newsletter in which he included a regular column called “Outrage of the Month.” In 1980, he self-published a book, “Worst Pills, Best Pills: A Consumer’s Guide to Avoiding Drug-Induced Death or Illness.” It became a New York Times best seller and has sold more than 2.2 million copies over multiple editions.His critics — and they were legion — called Dr. Wolfe a “gadfly” and a “zealot,” and even his admirers acknowledged that he could be demanding and impatient. For his 75th birthday, one of his daughters and a son-in-law gave him a doll, made to look like him, with a button that when pressed said, “It’s an outrage!”He laughed off the jabs, but also insisted that he took a more measured approach than his critics said. He did not go after emergency or lifesaving drugs, like those aimed at cancer or AIDS, he said, because he felt their benefits outweighed virtually any side effect. He also pointed out that most of what he published was not outrage but information — for example, a regular series in his newsletter about how to read a drug label.But he never apologized for taking a tough stand against the health care industry.“Somebody has to look out for people who are being manipulated by the hospitals, doctors, insurance and drug companies,” he told The Progressive magazine in 1993.Sidney Manuel Wolfe was born on June 12, 1937, in Cleveland, the son of Fred and Sophia (Marks) Wolfe. His mother was an English teacher, his father an inspector for the U.S. Labor Department.His first career aspiration was chemical engineering, which he studied at Cornell University. But he decided to find a new path after spending a summer working in a factory that made hydrofluoric acid, where regular contact with chemicals meant that “every day I’d go home with first-degree burns,” he told The Washington Post in 1978.He transferred to Western Reserve University (today Case Western Reserve University), from which he graduated in 1959, and continued on into medical school. There he studied under Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician and peace activist, and spent time working with drug-overdose cases — two experiences that would shape his career.Dr. Wolfe in an undated photo. His consumer advocacy organization, the Health Research Group, was an offshoot of Mr. Nader’s organization Public Citizen.Beverly Orr/Public CitizenAfter receiving his medical degree in 1965, Dr. Wolfe served in the Public Health Service, then moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he researched addiction. He also worked with the Medical Committee for Human Rights, a group of health care professionals active in the civil rights movement.Late one night he called a friend and fellow doctor to ask him to provide care for a sick woman associated with the Black Panthers.“He said, ‘Get your ass out of bed,’” recalled the doctor, Anthony Fauci, later the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in a 1992 interview with The Wall Street Journal. “That’s vintage Sid.”Dr. Wolfe’s first marriage, to Ava Albert, ended in divorce. He married Dr. Goldberg, a psychologist and artist, in 1978. Along with her, he is survived by four children from his first marriage, Hannah, Leah, Rachel and Sarah Wolfe; two stepsons, Nadav and Stefan Savio; five grandchildren; and his sister, Janet, also a psychologist.Dr. Wolfe received a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a “genius grant,” in 1990. From 2008 to 2012 he served on the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee, a part of the F.D.A. He retired from running the Health Research Group in 2013.He remained active at Public Citizen, though he insisted that he had significantly cut back his time commitment, from 60 or more hours a week to a mere 40 to 45.

A child psychologist, he argued that behavioral therapy had to come first in addressing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, with drugs like Ritalin as a supplement.William E. Pelham Jr., a child psychologist who challenged how his field approached attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children, arguing for a therapy-based regimen that used drugs like Ritalin and Adderall as an optional supplement, died on Oct. 21 in Miami. He was 75.His son, William E. Pelham III, who is also a child psychologist, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but did not provide a cause.Dr. Pelham began his career in the mid-1970s, when the modern understanding of mental health was emerging and psychologists were only just beginning to understand A.D.H.D. — and with it a new generation of medication to treat it.Through the 1980s and ’90s, doctors and many parents embraced A.D.H.D. drugs like Ritalin and Adderall as miracle medications, though some, including Dr. Pelham, raised concerns about their efficacy and side effects.Dr. Pelham was not opposed to medication. He recognized that drugs were effective at rapidly addressing the symptoms of A.D.H.D., like fidgeting, impulsiveness and lack of concentration. But in a long string of studies and papers, he argued that for most children, behavioral therapy, combined with parental intervention techniques, should be the first line of attack, followed by low doses of drugs, if necessary.And yet, as he pointed out repeatedly, the reality was far different: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2016 that while six in 10 children diagnosed with A.D.H.D. were on medication, fewer than half received behavioral therapy.In one major study, which he published in 2016 along with Susan Murphy, a statistician at the University of Michigan, he demonstrated the importance of treatment sequencing — that behavioral therapy should come first, then medication.He and Dr. Murphy split a group of 146 children with A.D.H.D., from ages 5 to 12, into two groups. One group received a low dose of generic Ritalin; the other received nothing, but their parents were given instruction in behavioral-modification techniques.After two months, children from both groups who showed no improvement were arranged into four new groups: The children given generic Ritalin received either more medication or behavioral modification therapy, and the children given behavioral modification therapy received either more intense therapy or a dose of medication.“We showed that the sequence in which you give treatments makes a big difference in outcomes,” Dr. Pelham told The New York Times. “The children who started with behavioral modification were doing significantly better than those who began with medication by the end, no matter what treatment combination they ended up with.”In 1980, Dr. Pelham started an innovative summer camp for children with A.D.H.D. and associated disorders.FIU Center for Children and FamiliesNot everyone agreed with Dr. Pelham’s conclusions, many on practical grounds. Medication was easy to administer, they said, and proper behavioral therapy could be time-consuming and expensive and therefore hard to maintain over a long stretch of time, both for parents and children — especially teenagers, who were more likely to resist it.Dr. Pelham’s influence can perhaps best be seen in the 2019 guidelines for A.D.H.D. diagnosis and treatment issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the group’s most recent recommendations. For very young children, it recommends treatment first, with medication as an option; for children 6 to 12, it recommends both simultaneously. But for adolescents, it concludes that behavioral treatment is unproven, and recommends medication only.Dr. Pelham began his career at Washington State University but spent most of it at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He moved his research program, the Center for Children and Families, to Florida International University, in Miami, in 2010.At both schools he ran an innovative summer camp for children with A.D.H.D. and associated disorders. The camp, which he created in 1980, served as a space for both therapy and research. It has since been the model for similar programs nationwide and internationally, including in Japan.“Dr. Pelham was one of the original giants in the field of A.D.H.D. research,” Dr. James McGough, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a phone interview.FIU Center for Children and FamiliesWilliam Ellerbe Pelham Jr. was born on Jan. 22, 1948, in Atlanta, the son of William and Kitty Copeland (Kay) Pelham. The family moved often for William Sr.’s work, first to Kensington, Md., where he managed a Canada Dry facility, and later to Montgomery, Ala., where he sold securities. His mother was a homemaker and an artist.William Jr. received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Dartmouth in 1970. He spent a year teaching special education in Amsterdam, N.Y., northwest of Albany, before enrolling in the doctoral program in psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, on Long Island. He received his Ph.D. in 1976.In addition to his son, Dr. Pelham is survived by his wife, Maureen (Cullinan) Pelham, whom he married in 1990; his daughter, Caroline Pelham; and his brothers, Gayle and John.Dr. Pelham insisted on a therapy-first approach in part because it equipped children with the skills they needed to manage what was often a lifelong struggle.“Our research has found time and time again that behavioral and educational intervention is the best first-line treatment for children with A.D.H.D.,” he said in an interview with the podcast The Academic Minute in 2022. “They, their teachers and parents learn skills and strategies that will help them succeed at home, in school and in their relationships.”

A renowned orthopedic surgeon, he developed innovative techniques for alpine Olympians. He also treated soccer, tennis and baseball stars.J. Richard Steadman, a pioneering orthopedic surgeon who saved the knees — and careers — of hundreds of Olympic skiers, Premier League soccer players and even the occasional professional golfer, died on Friday at his home in Vail, Colo. He was 85.A spokeswoman for the Steadman Clinic, which he founded in 1990, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.If you made the trek to Dr. Steadman’s clinic, high in the Colorado mountains, you would find an office covered in evidence of his decades of surgical success: signed soccer jerseys and baseball pennants, autographed photos and simple notes of deep gratitude.He built his reputation in the 1970s as the head doctor for the United States Ski Team, treating Olympians like Phil Mahre, Cindy Nelson and Christin Cooper. After Mahre shattered his ankle on a slalom gate during a 1979 World Cup race, Dr. Steadman went to work. Just 11 months later, Mahre won a silver medal at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y.Dr. Steadman’s fame extended beyond skiing. Martina Navratilova (tennis) and Greg Norman (golf) relied on him to repair torn knees. The quarterbacks Dan Marino, Joe Montana and John Elway all came to him for help. National Basketball Association stars frequented his surgical rooms, and he developed a particularly intense following among British soccer players.“He’s the genius who saved my career,” Alan Shearer, best known for his time as a striker for Newcastle United, told The Guardian in 2006. “I made up my mind I would travel anywhere in the world to find the right man for the job. I can’t speak highly enough of the guy.”Dr. Steadman was widely considered one of the best orthopedic surgeons of his generation, though he tended to shrink from praise. He insisted that he was no better than anyone else, and that his secret was the organization he had built around himself.Along with the clinic, he operated a nonprofit, today known as the Steadman Philippon Research Institute, which tracks his patients’ recovery and churns out precise data to help Dr. Steadman and his small team of doctors hone their craft.Dr. Steadman was unafraid to push his field into controversial directions. He was among the first orthopedic surgeons to eschew plaster casts in favor of starting physical therapy immediately, an approach that drew criticism at first but is now widely accepted, especially for athletes eager to get back into their game. He would oversee the U.S. Ski Team’s recovery himself, often putting them up at his home.“In those days, everybody was in a cast except my patients,” he told The Denver Post in 2016. “My patients would move their ankle right away, their knee right away. I got a head start on everybody, because I recognized that just because you moved something didn’t mean it wouldn’t heal. In fact, it would heal better. The movement made the tissues get stronger.”He developed new procedures, like microfracturing, a treatment for injuries to the anterior cruciate ligament in which small cracks are made in the underlying bone, facilitating cartilage growth and a more rapid recovery.“We would say, ‘There’s only one place to go, and that’s Dr. Steadman,’” Eva Twardokens, a former member of the U.S. Ski Team and a frequent patient of Dr. Steadman’s, said in a phone interview. “‘He’s the one who will get you back onto the skis.’”John Richard Steadman was born on June 4, 1937, in Sherman, Texas, about 60 miles north of Dallas. His father, Beverly Steadman, was a colonel in the Air Force, and his mother, Mary (Ellis) Steadman, was a homemaker.His father’s career required the Steadmans to move frequently — for a time they lived in Berlin — before settling outside Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio. Richard excelled in football, baseball and golf. He also excelled in school, and he received a scholarship offer from Harvard in his senior year.But a phone call from the famed football coach Bear Bryant, inviting him to play at Texas A&M, changed his mind. He was a reserve offensive tackle for the Aggies for two years and had hopes of starting in his junior year. But his grades were sagging, and he was determined to go to medical school. He finally worked up the courage to write the imposing Coach Bryant a letter, telling him why he was quitting.“He wrote back and he said that he respected my decision,” Dr. Steadman told Sports Illustrated in 1983. “He said that he hoped maybe someday I would take care of him when I got to be a doctor.”He graduated in 1959 and received his M.D. in 1963 from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. He then spent two years in the Army, stationed in Germany, and did his residency at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.Dr. Steadman is survived by his wife, Gay; his son, Lyon; his daughter, Liddy Lind; his sister, Mary; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.Dr. Steadman began his career in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., where he joined a private practice in 1970 and began working with the U.S. Ski Team in 1973. He moved to Vail in 1990 and retired in 2014.He was an avid skier himself — though he took to the slopes with caution.“I take every opportunity that I can,” he told The New York Times in 1993. “But I do follow my own rules, such as conditioning myself before skiing. And I try to ski in control.”

He treated celebrities, advised a governor and saved an Irish historical society. But he died under a cloud of sexual assault allegations.Kevin M. Cahill, who managed to pack several careers into a single life as a leading expert on tropical diseases, a doctor to celebrities and politicians, a close adviser to Gov. Hugh L. Carey of New York and a savior to the ailing American Irish Historical Society, but who later faced allegations of sexual assault by two women, died on Wednesday at his home in Point Lookout, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 86.His son Brendan said that the cause of death had not been determined, but that his father had been in failing health.A short, stocky man with big, bushy eyebrows and an accent that tilted between Gaelic brogue and Noo Yawkese, Dr. Cahill managed to become a globe-trotting humanitarian while keeping thick roots planted in New York’s Irish American community.After an early stint as a doctor in Cairo and India, where he worked alongside Mother Teresa, Dr. Cahill returned to New York, where he established one of the country’s first centers for tropical disease, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. He was among the first doctors to call attention to the city’s emerging AIDS crisis, organizing a groundbreaking conference on the disease in 1983.He spent the late 1970s commuting to Albany, where, as Governor Carey’s health policy expert, he moved mountains to reshape the state’s flailing medical bureaucracy, making a host of enemies but impressing even his detractors as a quick study and an effective political infighter.A top expert in humanitarian medicine who worked in 65 countries, Dr. Cahill established an amputee clinic in Somalia and directed earthquake relief in Nicaragua, experiences he discussed in 1993 on the NPR program “Fresh Air With Terry Gross.”He was the personal physician to a long list of elite New Yorkers, including the top figures in the city’s Roman Catholic hierarchy. He was with Leonard Bernstein when Bernstein took his last breath. He was one of two American doctors invited to Rome to assess the health of Pope John Paul II after he was shot in 1981.And as a prominent figure among Irish Americans who quoted Yeats with ease, he revived the American Irish Historical Society, which was founded in 1897 and occupies a stately former townhouse on Fifth Avenue, across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.The society had practically ceased to exist when Dr. Cahill took it over in the early 1970s. He raised funds to renovate its home and made its annual gala a must-do on the city’s social calendar, in the process helping to make Ireland a subject of popular fascination.“Dr. Cahill was a pioneer in bringing a prominence and seriousness to the study of Irish and Irish American culture that had long been lacking,” Peter Quinn, a writer and former member of the historical society’s board, said in a phone interview.Dr. Cahill’s life was not without controversy. His critics found him self-serious, nepotistic and egotistic.As his time as the head of the American Irish Historical Society wore on, he was accused of treating it more and more like his personal kingdom. He installed his sons as officers, booted officials who crossed him and unilaterally announced a plan to sell the townhouse in 2021, a move that has been under review by the state government.“The building on Fifth Avenue is something that stands for all of us,” Brian McCabe, a former leading figure in the society, told The New York Times that year. “This is about a very small group controlling what is held in trust for the Irish in America and around the world.”In 2020 a former patient, Megan Wesko, sued Dr. Cahill in federal court, alleging that he had pursued a romantic relationship with her and sexually assaulted her during an examination, a development reported in The Times in June. In 2022 another woman, Natalie Mauro, said that he had also sexually assaulted her at his office.Dr. Cahill was not charged with any crimes. He denied the allegations, and the lawsuit was still pending at his death.Dr. Cahill, left, with Cardinal Francis Spellman at the Tropical Disease Research Center of St. Clare’s Hospital in Manhattan in 1966. Dr. Cahill was the personal physician to a long list of elite New Yorkers, including the top figures in the city’s Roman Catholic hierarchy.Meyer Liebowitz/The New York TimesA grandson of Irish immigrants, Kevin Michael Cahill was born on May 5, 1936, in the Bronx. His father, John, was a doctor. His mother, Genevieve (Campion) Cahill, was a teacher and homemaker.He studied classics at Fordham University, graduating in 1957, and received his medical degree from Cornell in 1961. As a medical student, and later as a fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, he traveled to Calcutta, India (now Kolkata), where he worked in a local clinic alongside Mother Teresa, then a little-known Albanian nun.“I find romance in settings that others might — quite legitimately — see only as dirty, broken-down wastelands,” he said in a graduation address at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts in 2008. “Surely those negatives existed in Calcutta. But amidst the fetid stenches of Indian urban decay, I mainly recall the strong aroma of exotic spices.”He served in the Navy Medical Corps from 1963 to 1965, working at a research facility in Cairo, after which he returned to New York to establish his medical practice.He married Kathryn McGinity in 1961. She died in 2004. Along with his son Brendan, he is survived by four other sons, Christopher, Kevin, Sean and Denis, and nine grandchildren.Dr. Cahill’s experience made him an obvious choice by Lenox Hill Hospital to lead its Tropical Disease Center, which opened in 1966. In 1970 he was named chairman of the department of tropical diseases at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, a post he held until 2006.After he became governor in 1975, Mr. Carey, himself a product of New York City’s Irish Catholic political scene, took Dr. Cahill with him to Albany and gave him the task of cleaning up the state’s sprawling, nearly insolvent health care system.The two were old friends, and Dr. Cahill served as one of the governor’s closest advisers. He worked for $1 a day, one day a week, often staying overnight at the governor’s mansion.“He’s very single‐minded, quite stubborn and rigid,” Albert H. Blumenthal, a Democrat who served as majority leader in the State Assembly, told The Times in 1977. “but he’s an easy man to deal with. There’s no deceit to him.”The relationship didn’t last, though; Dr. Cahill and Mr. Carey reportedly had a falling-out, and Dr. Cahill left the governor’s office in 1980.He went on to work for the New York City Board of Health, advise the United Nations on global health and direct the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs at Fordham. He also wrote several books, including, most recently, “Tropical Medicine: A Clinical Text” (2021). He left both Fordham and Lenox Hill Hospital in 2020.

While no definitive statistics exist, doctors say he was likely the longest-surviving intubated Covid patient.As the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the country in March 2020, the family of Marc Lewitinn, their 74-year-old patriarch, urged him to stay indoors. He had survived lung cancer and a stroke that left him unable to speak, and doctors were already warning that older people with his sort of medical history were especially vulnerable to the virus.He complied, more or less. But he soon felt cooped up, and one day he ventured into a crowded Starbucks near his home in Cliffside Park, N.J. By March 25, he was feeling lethargic. A pulse oximeter showed his blood oxygen level at just 85 percent.His son Albert, a TV producer, took him to the emergency room at Weill Cornell Medicine in Manhattan. The hospital was inundated with patients and doctors in hazmat suits, and it took hours for someone to see him. He tested positive for Covid that night. Six days later, with his oxygen level falling further, doctors decided to intubate him and induce a coma.They told the Lewitinn family that Marc, a retired Manhattan shopkeeper, would likely die within a few days; in the early months of the pandemic especially, the survival rate for intubated Covid patients was about 50 percent, and that included people who were younger and healthier than Mr. Lewitinn.“They stepped outside with the iPad to ask us if we wanted to just give him morphine and let him pass away naturally,” Albert Lewitinn said in an email. “On a group FaceTime, we urged my father to fight. We didn’t say goodbye; we said, ‘Keep fighting, Dad, you’re going to be fine.’”Mr. Lewitinn stabilized and recovered from Covid, but he remained too weakened to come off the ventilator. After six months he was brought out of his coma and eventually moved to another hospital, closer to his New Jersey home.After 850 days on the ventilator, Mr. Lewitinn died of a heart attack on July 23 at Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, N.J. He was 76. His son Albert confirmed the death.While there are no comprehensive statistics for how long Covid patients have survived on ventilation, medical experts say Mr. Lewitinn may hold the record. The literature around the pandemic notes a few patients who have lasted more than three months; a patient in Alabama made headlines in 2021 when he came off a respirator after 187 days.None of those come close to Mr. Lewitinn’s streak, a combination, doctors say, of his physical and mental strength and the swiftness with which the medical establishment developed protocols for long-term Covid care.“He had a long and difficult course,” Dr. Abraham Sanders, one of his physicians at Weill Cornell, wrote in an email. “He was a strong man and was the beneficiary of sophisticated medical care.”Marco Albert Lewitinn was born on March 12, 1946, to a Jewish family in Cairo. His father, Albert Lewitinn, was a medical engineer, and his mother, Sarah (Amiga) Lewitinn, a homemaker. He grew up speaking Arabic and later learned English, French and Spanish.Egypt had a thriving Jewish community of 75,000 people, but they faced worsening conditions after the Arab nationalist revolution in 1952 and the Suez Crisis in 1956, which pitted the country against Israel, France and Britain. The government took over the elder Mr. Lewitinn’s business and, after being briefly detained, he and his family were expelled in 1958.They settled in Baltimore, where Albert Lewitinn was hired by Johns Hopkins University to work on organ transplant technology.As a young man Marc lived in New York City and Los Angeles, where he briefly attended college, then Paris, where he met Ondine Green, the sister of a childhood friend from Cairo. They married in 1968.The Lewitinns settled in the New York City area, first in Brooklyn and later in Tenafly, N.J. He opened a business on the Upper West Side that operated as a sort of everything store for the neighborhood: pawn shop, film processing, electronics repair, jeweler. It became a local fixture; John Lennon, who lived nearby, came in occasionally, and Mr. Lewitinn hung a picture of himself with Lennon on a wall at the store.He sold the business in 1981, after which he bought and sold real estate and later traded in art online.Mr. Lewitinn was an ardent supporter of Israel and Jewish causes. He raised money for Ethiopian Jews fleeing their country as refugees, and won praise from the Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal and Charles Kremer for helping to persuade the U.S. government to deport Archbishop Valerian Trifa, a Romanian cleric and fascist collaborator who had moved to the United States after World War II.In 1995, Mr. Lewitinn sued the Egyptian government to win the release of several Torah scrolls, prayer books and other religious items seized from the country’s Jewish community in the late 1950s. He later dropped the case.Along with his son Albert, he is survived by his wife; another son, Lawrence, a real-estate investor; his daughter, Sarah, a record producer and D.J. who performs under the name Ultragrrrl; his sisters Fortunee Yeh and Rachel Algazi; his brothers Solomon, Michael and Nessim; and two grandchildren.

He helped write the first comprehensive dictionary of American Sign Language and later identified the deaf as a part of society worth examining.Carl Croneberg, a deaf Swedish immigrant who helped write the first comprehensive dictionary of American Sign Language and was the first to outline the idea of Deaf culture as a distinct part of society and one worth studying, died on Aug. 11. He was 92.His death was announced by Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the only university for the hearing-impaired in the United States, where he earned a degree and spent his entire career. The university did not specify the cause or say where he died.Mr. Croneberg was a new member of the Gallaudet faculty when, in 1957, the linguist William C. Stokoe Jr., himself recently arrived on campus, recruited him to join his new Linguistics Research Laboratory. Until the late 1950s, many linguists had dismissed sign language as a poor substitute for spoken language, a rigid, imprecise system of gestures that left no room for nuance.Dr. Stokoe, who was hearing, believed otherwise, though he had gone to Gallaudet with no previous training in sign language and no real exposure to a Deaf community — his specialty was Middle English.Yet it didn’t take long for him to confirm his hunch. While undergoing a crash course in American Sign Language, he noticed that the signs he was learning in class were sometimes different from what his students were using among themselves.The difference, he was told, was slang — and in that difference he saw the capacity for A.S.L. to be every bit as capacious as spoken language. Dr. Stokoe committed himself to developing a script, and from that, a dictionary. But to do so he needed colleagues with native-speaker experience.Mr. Croneberg, left, with his mentor William C. Stokoe. Their work together led to a dictionary of American sigh language.Gallaudet ArchivesHe chose Mr. Croneberg and a second colleague, Dorothy Casterline, both young instructors at Gallaudet, not only because of their intelligence, but also because, in a way, they were outsiders, too: Mr. Croneberg grew up in Sweden, Ms. Casterline in Hawaii.That made it possible for them to both analyze the language in a way that Dr. Stokoe could not access, yet also examine its use with a certain amount of detachment.Mr. Croneberg’s charge was to assess how Deaf people deploy sign language in everyday life and around the country. He traveled throughout New England and the South, interviewing Deaf residents and conducting ethnographic investigations, paying attention to how the language informed their lives.What he found may not have surprised his research subjects, but it astounded other linguists. He identified significant regional variations; the sign for cheese, for example, was different in Washington, D.C., and Virginia. Catholics and Protestants had different words for the same religious objects. And he found different dialects among old and young, and between Black and white people.“The community of Deaf people who use sign language and who have more or less frequent social contact with each other extends all over North America,” he wrote. “But the whole divides into local and regional groups which can be mapped geographically.”Mr. Croneberg published his results as two appendices to “A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles” (1965), which he wrote with Dr. Stokoe and Ms. Casterline, and which became a seminal text among Deaf scholars.“Stokoe would not have been able to do the work without his colleagues, Carl and Dorothy,” Pamela Wright, who teaches linguistics at Gallaudet, said in an email. “It was a perfect mix of skills that pulled together to study A.S.L. as an authentic language. Stokoe didn’t know signs, he was still learning, and Carl and Dorothy were his connection to the community.”Ever the linguist, Mr. Croneberg saw American Sign Language as the core of what he coined “Deaf culture,” a term that later generations of researchers built into an entire field of study. And he was among the first to outline Black American Sign Language as a distinct dialect.In recognition of their contributions, Gallaudet presented Mr. Croneberg and Ms. Casterline with honorary degrees in May 2022.“Deaf scholars like the ones who stand before us today are enjoying opportunities for a better life thanks to the painstaking research conducted in the 1950s and early 1960s by Mr. Croneberg and his colleagues,” the university said in announcing the awards.Carl Gustav Arvid Olof Croneberg was born on April 26, 1930, in Norrbacka, a small town about 30 miles northeast of Stockholm. Deaf from birth, he was sent by his parents to a specialized school, where, in addition to learning Swedish sign language in class, he taught himself written English and German through a correspondence school.A chance encounter with Leonard M. Elstad, the president of Gallaudet, who was traveling in Europe, persuaded Mr. Croneberg to come to America to study at the university, according to research by Carey Ballard, a doctoral student in linguistics at Boston University. Mr. Croneberg arrived in 1951 and graduated with a degree in English four years later.He was immediately hired as a junior faculty member while he took graduate studies at the nearby Catholic University of America. He received a master’s degree in English there in 1959, but despite high grades and Dr. Stokoe’s strong recommendation, he was not admitted to the university’s doctoral program in anthropology because its director thought it would be too difficult for a deaf person.He continued to teach English at Gallaudet, and over time became an inspiration for a new generation of linguists and scholars of Deaf studies, who created programs and departments at Boston University; California State University, Northridge; and other institutions.Mr. Croneberg retired in 1986. Survivors include his wife, Eleanor (Wetzel) Croneberg, and his daughter, Lisa Croneberg.

After years of pioneering research into inherited disorders, mostly in children, he spoke openly about his struggle with mental illness.Dr. Leon E. Rosenberg, who after spending decades as a pioneer in the field of medical genetics revealed that he had spent just as long struggling with manic depression, and who then urged doctors to be more open about their own mental health, died on July 22 at his home in Lawrenceville, N.J. He was 89.His wife, Diane Drobnis Rosenberg, said the cause was pneumonia.Dr. Rosenberg straddled the worlds of clinical and laboratory medicine. He labeled himself a “physician-scientist” whose research methods began and ended at the bedside of a patient with an undiagnosed condition, which he then tried to define and treat.Beginning in the early 1960s, he specialized in inherited metabolic disorders — cases in which the body is unable to process certain compounds, which then accumulate and poison a patient.Most of his patients were children, including one of his first, a 9-year-old boy named Steven, whose skeletal muscles were rapidly wasting away. Dr. Rosenberg, who was then a fellow at the National Institutes of Health, found nothing wrong except a high level of amino acids in Steven’s urine. He interviewed Steven’s parents, who said they had had two other children with similar conditions, both of whom had died. Steven died not long after.“I was unable to change the course of Steven’s illness,” Dr. Rosenberg wrote in a 2014 article. “But he changed the course of my professional life. He showed me that asking research questions based on seeing patients was like medical detective work. Even more important, he ignited my interest in genetic disorders and kindled it.”Dr. Rosenberg moved to the Yale School of Medicine in 1965, intent on solving mysteries like Steven’s — which he did, many times over. He was the founding chairman of the school’s department of human genetics and, later, the school’s president.He scaled the peaks of his profession, sitting on corporate boards and joining the National Academy of Sciences. In 1989 he was shortlisted to run the National Institutes of Health, alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci.But, as Dr. Rosenberg revealed much later, Steven’s case also came not long after his own first episode of crippling depression, what he called his “unwanted guest.” His first months at the National Institutes of Health had been difficult; he felt like a failure and wanted to leave research entirely.Though similar episodes struck later, often around major career changes, he never talked about them, or sought treatment, until he attempted suicide in 1998. His doctor diagnosed bipolar II disorder, and Dr. Rosenberg underwent electroshock therapy and took lithium.Doctors can suffer from depression just like anyone else, but Dr. Rosenberg was the rare physician who spoke openly about it — first in classroom and professional lectures, then in a series of articles and, ultimately, in a book, “Genes, Medicines, Moods: A Memoir of Success and Struggle” (2020).“I am proof,” Dr. Rosenberg wrote in his memoir, “that it is possible to live a highly successful career in medicine and science, and to struggle with a complex, serious mental illness at the same time.”He called on his fellow doctors to speak up as well, both for their own sake and for the sake of their families, colleagues and patients.“The list of writers who have described their suicidal attempts and suicidal thoughts is long and illustrious,” he wrote in a 2002 article. “Yet physicians and scientists, who commit and attempt suicide at least as often as artists, writers, politicians and business leaders, have been remarkably silent.”Several of Dr. Rosenberg’s relatives had similarly suffered from mental illness, and he marveled at the coincidence that his professional career and personal struggles both revolved around inherited disorders.“I am proof,” he wrote in his memoir, “that it is possible to live a highly successful career in medicine and science, and to struggle with a complex, serious mental illness at the same time.”Leon Emanuel Rosenberg was born on March 3, 1933, in Madison, Wis. Both his parents, Abraham and Celia (Mazursky) Rosenberg, had fled pogroms in present-day Belarus, though they did not meet until they settled in Waunakee, a Madison suburb.After working for a while as a peddler, Abraham made enough money to open his own general store. He learned English quickly and even perfected a rural Wisconsin accent, which helped him relate to his customers. Celia, a homemaker, maintained her thick Yiddish accent.A childhood accident involving a mill at Celia’s family farm had mutilated her left hand, leaving all but her thumb and forefinger useless. “Sometime around age 5,” Dr. Rosenberg wrote in his memoir, “while holding her left hand in both of mine, I told her that I intended to be a doctor so I could repair her hand.”Leon was an exemplary student: He was valedictorian of his high school and finished summa cum laude at the University of Wisconsin, where he graduated in 1954 and received his medical degree in 1957. He interned at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital before moving to the National Institutes of Health as a research fellow in 1959.His first marriage, to Elaine Lewis, ended in divorce. Along with his wife, he is survived by his brother, Irwin, the former dean of the School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University; his sons, Robert Rosenberg and David Korish; his daughters, Diana Clark and Alexa Rosenberg; six grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.It was while at Yale that Dr. Rosenberg led research into inherited metabolic disorders, despite skepticism from colleagues about the very basis of such work. “Don’t be silly,” he recalled one Yale nephrologist telling him. “There is no such thing.”Dr. Rosenberg proved him wrong. He filled lectures with case studies of children — Steven, of course, followed by Dana, Lorraine, Robby and others — who presented inexplicable disorders, which he repeatedly showed to be caused by their bodies’ inability to metabolize various acids, and which could often be easily treated.His research brought him public prominence, both as a researcher and as an advocate for equity in medicine. As the dean of the Yale School of Medicine from 1984 to 1991, he made it easier for people of color and women to rise to senior faculty positions, and he placed students as volunteers in New Haven public schools.He left Yale in 1991 to become the chief science officer at Bristol Myers Squibb. In 1998 he moved to Princeton University as a lecturer in molecular biology, with a joint appointment, also as a lecturer, in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (now the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs).Dr. Rosenberg made national headlines in 1981 when he testified before a Senate subcommittee on a bill that would define life as beginning at conception, in effect overturning Roe v. Wade. Of the eight doctors invited to speak, he was the only one to disagree with the bill’s premise — and he said so forcefully.“Don’t ask science or medicine to help justify that course, because they cannot,” he said. “Ask your conscience, your minister, your priest, your rabbi, or even your god, because it is in their domain that this matter resides.”The bill failed soon after.

The couple advocated the use of hallucinogens in psychotherapy and documented their experiences with hundreds of drugs in two widely read books.Ann Shulgin, who alongside her husband, Alexander Shulgin, developed and experimented with hundreds of psychedelic drugs that he concocted in his California laboratory, then showed readers how to formulate them in a pair of massive books that attracted a cult following, died on July 9 at her home near Lafayette, Calif. She was 91.Her daughter Wendy Tucker confirmed the death.People who use themselves as guinea pigs to research new psychoactive drugs, or to explore the mind-altering capacities of existing ones, are known as psychonauts, and the Shulgins were among the world’s most experienced: Ms. Shulgin claimed to have experienced 2,000 drug-induced psychedelic episodes, an astounding number that pales only in comparison to her husband’s 4,000.They took their work seriously. Whenever Alexander Shulgin, known as Sasha, who had a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, would concoct a new drug, Ms. Shulgin would give it a try, at a minuscule dose. If it seemed to have an effect, they would convene a panel of friends — fellow chemists, psychiatrists and anthropologists — to test it at higher dosages.One of their friends, the psychologist and noted fellow psychonaut Timothy Leary, told The Los Angeles Times in 1995, “I consider Shulgin and his wife to be two of the most important scientists of the 20th century.”They believed that psychedelic drugs held immense promise for use in psychotherapy, and Ms. Shulgin employed drugs like MDMA, better known as Ecstasy or Molly, with her clients for years as a lay therapist. For decades that belief put them far outside the mainstream, but it turns out they were simply ahead of their time: Researchers and therapists have recently begun to embrace the use of hallucinogens, including Ecstasy, in small doses to treat a range of psychological disorders.Ms. Shulgin and her husband, Alexander, in 1979. When he invented new drugs, she would give them a try.Dale Gross/Shulgin Family Trust, via Associated Press“Sasha and I work pretty much as a team,” Ms. Shulgin said in a 2001 interview with the French newspaper Libération, published in English on Erowid, a website devoted to research on psychoactive drugs. “We both have the same interests, but our viewpoints are different: He has the scientific viewpoint, and I have the psychological and the spiritual. We supplement each other in our writing.”Dr. Shulgin was known as the “godfather of Ecstasy”: He didn’t invent the drug (that happened in 1912), but he was the first person to describe its potential uses in therapy. He never approved of its recreational use, not because he was a killjoy — he and his wife went to the Burning Man Festival three times — but because its abuse led governments to outlaw it.The Shulgins were among the few researchers in the country allowed to work with federally banned drugs — so-called Schedule 1 drugs — thanks to Dr. Shulgin’s close ties with the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he was an occasional consultant. In 1981 an administrator from the agency officiated at their wedding, in his backyard.The Shulgins’ relationship with the D.E.A. broke apart after they published their first book together, “PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story” (1991). The title stands for “Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved,” referring to a class of drugs that includes Ecstasy and mescaline.The book is divided into two parts: first a thinly veiled autobiography, then a do-it-yourself guide to making some 170 drugs, a feature that made the self-published volume an underground hit in the United States and Europe.The feds were less enamored. In 1993 they raided Dr. Shulgin’s laboratory, fined him $25,000 and took away his Schedule 1 license.From then on, the Shulgins insisted, they never experimented with proscribed drugs, just the new ones that Dr. Shulgin devised, which remained legal until they were added to the Schedule 1 list.In any case, their focus was on breaking new ground.“Inventing new psychoactive drugs,” Ms. Shulgin told The Los Angeles Times in 1995, “is like composing new music.”Ms. Shulgin at her home in California in 2021. She and her husband complemented each other’s strengths, she said: “He has the scientific viewpoint, and I have the psychological and the spiritual.”Wendy Tucker, via Associated PressLaura Ann Gotlieb was born on March 22, 1931, in Wellington, New Zealand, where her father, Bernard Gotlieb, an American diplomat, was serving as consul. Her mother, Gwen (Ormiston) Gotlieb, a native New Zealander, was a homemaker.The Gotliebs moved often: to Sicily, followed by several years in Trieste, Italy; Nuevo Laredo, Mexico; Santiago, Cuba; and Windsor, Ontario. After Mr. Gotlieb retired, they settled in San Francisco, where Ann took art classes and worked as a medical transcriber.She took her first psychedelic trip in the early 1960s, at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. “We stopped and looked around us at the earth, the sky and each other, then I saw something forming in the air, slightly above the level of my head,” she recalled in “PiHKAL.” “It was a moving spiral opening, up there in the cool air, and I knew it was a doorway to the other side of existence.”Her first three marriages ended in divorce. Dr. Shulgin died in 2014. Along with her daughter Ms. Tucker, she is survived by another daughter, Alice Garofalo; two sons, Christopher McRee and Brian Perry; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.After the success of “PiHKAL,” the couple wrote a second volume, “TiHKAL: The Continuation” (1997). The T stands for tryptamines, which include psilocybin and other hallucinogens.While Dr. Shulgin was primarily interested in drugs for their consciousness-expanding capacities, Ms. Shulgin prized them for allowing people to look inward.Though she had no formal training, she considered herself a lay therapist in the Jungian tradition, and she incorporated Ecstasy and other drugs in her practice as a way to help her clients confront repressed emotions, memories and self-impressions.“MDMA is an insight drug,” she said in one interview. “That is its major function. Insight without self-hatred. It allows you to really love yourself and appreciate what you are.”