He called himself “a healthy mosaic” of the two faiths. An ophthalmologist, he also ran a clinic that brought sight back to Tibetans with cataracts.Dr. Marc Lieberman, an ophthalmologist and self-proclaimed “Jewish Buddhist” who, when he wasn’t treating glaucoma, organized a dialogue between Jewish scholars and the Dalai Lama, and who later brought sight back to thousands of Tibetans stricken by cataracts, died on Aug. 2 at his home in San Francisco. He was 72.His son, Michael, said the cause was prostate cancer.Dr. Lieberman, who called himself a “JuBu,” retained his Jewish faith but incorporated aspects of Buddhist teachings and practices. He kept kosher and observed the sabbath, but he also meditated several times a day. He studied the Torah, but he also led efforts to build a Buddhist monastery in Northern California.If it seemed like a contradiction to some, he was OK with that, seeing in both religions a complementary pursuit of truth and path away from worldly suffering.“I’m a healthy mosaic of Judaism and Buddhism,” Dr. Lieberman said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2006. “Is that fair to either religion? Fair schmair! It’s what I am.”In the 1980s, he became a leader in the lay Buddhist community in the Bay Area, holding weekly meetings in his living room and hosting monks who visited from around the world.As such, he was an obvious point of contact when the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, announced that he was planning a visit to the United States in 1989, and that he was curious to learn more about Judaism. A friend in the office of Representative Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, asked if Dr. Lieberman would facilitate a dialogue between the holy man and American Jewish leaders.Dr. Lieberman jumped into action, assembling what he called a “dream team” of rabbis and Jewish scholars for a one-day meeting with the Dalai Lama at a Tibetan Buddhist temple in New Jersey.It was a success, though an all-too-brief one, it being difficult to pack thousands of years of religious tradition into a single afternoon chat. But the Dalai Lama came away impressed, and Dr. Lieberman decided to go bigger.The next year he accompanied eight of the original group to Dharmsala, the town in northern India where the Dalai Lama lives in exile. Over four days, Jewish and Buddhist thinkers discussed the two faiths’ shared experiences with suffering, their differing concepts of God and the role that mysticism plays in each.Along to observe was Rodger Kamenetz, a poet who had been a friend of Dr. Lieberman’s since childhood. At a moment of crisis in his own life, Mr. Kamenetz found the trip moving, and he documented the experience in a book, “The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India” (1994).Dr. Lieberman examining a patient in Tsochen, Tibet, in 2003.Isaac SolotaroffThe book sold well and drove thousands of Americans, Jews and non-Jews, to explore Buddhism — while at the same time driving others to see the potential for a different, more mystical Judaism.“Marc really deserves credit for that dialogue, for opening Jews to their own meditative and esoteric traditions,” Mr. Kamenetz said in an interview.Dr. Lieberman wasn’t done. During his conversations with the Dalai Lama and his entourage, he learned that thanks to the harsh ultraviolet light that blankets the 15,000-foot Tibetan Plateau, 15 percent of Tibetans over 40 — and 50 percent of those over 70 — have cataracts.In 1995 he founded the Tibet Vision Project, a grand name for what was largely a solo act: Twice a year, sometimes with a colleague, he traveled to Tibet, where he oversaw cataract surgeries and trained Tibetan doctors to perform them. Over the next 20 years, some 5,000 people regained their full sight thanks to Dr. Lieberman.It was, he might have said, the ultimate mitzvah for a people, and a leader, who had given him so much.“I remember him saying to the Dalai Lama, ‘When you come back to Tibet I want the Tibetan people to see you,’” Mr. Kamenetz recalled.Marc Frank Lieberman was born on July 7, 1949, in Baltimore, the son of Alfred and Annette (Filzer) Lieberman. His father was a surgeon; his mother worked for a local private school and, later, for the area chapter of Planned Parenthood.Though his uncle Morris Lieberman was the rabbi at one of Baltimore’s leading Reform synagogues, Marc grew up more interested in the intellectual and activist sides of Judaism than in the faith itself.He studied religion at Reed College in Oregon and, after graduating, took pre-med courses at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While in Israel he met Alicia Friedman, who became his first wife. He also became more religious, keeping kosher and observing the sabbath.He attended medical school at Johns Hopkins University and completed his residency in Ann Arbor, Mich. He then settled in San Francisco, where he opened a private practice specializing in glaucoma treatment, which later expanded to three offices around the Bay Area.Despite his professional success, Dr. Lieberman — who was also a successful textbook author and a clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco — grew disenchanted with medicine.“It was a high price for me to pay to undergo the rigors of training,” he said in “Visioning Tibet,” a 2006 documentary about his work. “There were so few role models of people who were connecting with patients as other humans, and the very reasons that motivated me to go into medicine became more and more distant the further I got in the field.”At a yoga class in 1982 he met Nancy Garfield, who introduced him to the Bay Area’s Buddhist community. After the two attended a retreat at a monastery near Santa Cruz, Dr. Lieberman realized that he had found the answer to his frustrations and despair, or at least an avenue to address them.In 1986 he and Ms. Garfield married in a Buddhist ceremony. That marriage, like his first, ended in divorce. In addition to his son, Dr. Lieberman is survived by his brothers, Elias and Victor.Soon after his second marriage, Dr. Lieberman took his first trip to northern India, at the invitation of a group of Indian doctors. He found the experience transformative.Dr. Lieberman, right, in Shigatse, Tibet, in 2002. He became a leader in the lay Buddhist community in the San Francisco area in the 1980s.Isaac Solotaroff“The great discovery for me in India was to see how spiritual the practice of medicine was,” he said in the documentary. “The medical centers in India, the ones I was fortunate enough to visit, are temples, and temples of love and service.”He began to make regular visits to India, working with local doctors and bringing back Buddhist books, devotional items and esoterica, which filled his house.“At the table,” Mr. Kamenetz wrote, a visitor would find “Shabbat candles; in the living room, incense; at the doorway, a mezuzah; in the meditation room, a five-foot-high Buddha. If he glanced at the bookshelf, he would have seen dharma and kabbalah competing for space, and one was as likely to find Pali as Hebrew.”Dr. Lieberman did not coin the term “JuBu,” and he was not the first proponent of integrating aspects of Buddhism into the Jewish faith — the poet Allen Ginsberg was among those who preceded him — but he became one of the most prominent.He struggled to keep his focus on interreligious dialogue and leave politics aside. But his many trips to Tibet left him embittered toward the Chinese government, which had annexed the region in 1959 and driven out its religious leaders, then sought to overwhelm Tibetan culture with its own.“It’s like visiting an Indian reservation run by General Custer’s family,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2006.Beijing didn’t think much of Dr. Lieberman either; he was often harassed at the border and forced to wait weeks in Kathmandu, Nepal, for a visa. Starting in 2008, the Chinese government gradually barred all foreign nongovernmental organizations from Tibet, bringing Dr. Lieberman’s efforts to an end.Not long before Dr. Lieberman died, Mr. Kamenetz visited him in San Francisco. One day he accompanied his friend to a chemotherapy appointment.“We were really enjoying the flowering trees in San Francisco, just taking in each flower, each tree,” Mr. Kamenetz recalled. “Naturally we were talking about impermanence. And he said the most beautiful thing: that impermanence doesn’t just mean that everything goes away, but also that there’s always something new coming into focus.“He said, ‘Whatever arises is the indispensable beautiful event that is arising.’”

She created one of Ethiopia’s largest orphanages and through it saved thousands from starvation and disease. She died of complications of Covid-19.Abebech Gobena was returning from a pilgrimage to the holy site of Gishen Mariam, about 300 miles north of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, when she saw the woman and her baby.It was 1980, and Ms. Gobena was passing through an area recently stricken by drought and an accompanying famine. All along the road were bodies — many dead, some dying, some still able to sit up and ask for food.“There were so many of these hungry people sprawled all over, you could not even walk,” she said in a 2010 interview with CNN. She handed out what little she had — a loaf of bread, a few liters of water.At first, Ms. Gobena thought the woman was asleep, and she watched as the baby tried to suckle at her breast. Then she realized the mother was dead.A man nearby was collecting bodies. He told her he was waiting for the child, a girl, to die.Without thinking further, Ms. Gobena picked up the baby, wrapped her in a cloth and took her home to Addis Ababa. She returned the next day with more food and water.“One of the men dying by the side of the road said to me, ‘This is my child. She is dying. I am dying. Please save my child,’” she recalled. “It was a terrible famine. There were no authorities. The government at that time did not want the famine to be public knowledge. So I had to pretend the children were mine and smuggle them out.”By the end of the year she had 21 children living with her and her husband, Kebede Yikoster. At first supportive, he eventually gave her an ultimatum: him or the children.Ms. Gobena left him, and most of her possessions, taking the children to live with her in a shack in the woods. She sold her jewelry to raise money, then eked out an income selling injera bread and honey wine. Unable to pay the children’s school fees, she found a tutor to visit the shack.She took in more children, and after years of battling government bureaucracy in Ethiopia, in 1986 she managed to register her organization — Abebech Gobena Children’s Care and Development Association — as a nonprofit, enabling her to raise money and accept grants.She bought farmland outside Addis Ababa, where she and the orphans worked, and sold the produce to fund the orphanage. They also built dozens of latrines, public kitchens and water points around the city.Ms. Gobena was known to many as Emaye, an Amharic word that loosely translates as “Wonderful Mother.” Her organization has given orphaned children a home and an education and taught them marketable job skills.AgohelmaToday the organization, known by its acronym in Amharic, Agohelma, is one of the largest nonprofits in Ethiopia. Along with its orphanage, it provides free school for hundreds of children, HIV/AIDS prevention and maternal health care — according to its own estimate, some 1.5 million Ethiopians have benefited from its services since 1980. They and many others call her the “Mother Teresa of Africa.”In June Ms. Gobena contracted Covid-19. She entered the intensive care unit at St. Paul’s Hospital in Addis Ababa, where she died on July 4. She was 85. Yitbarek Tekalign, a spokesman for Agohelma, confirmed her death.“Abebech Gobena was one of the most selfless and pure-hearted people I ever met,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization and a former Ethiopian minister of health, said in a statement. “She helped many children not only to survive, but succeed in life.”Abebech Gobena Heye was born on Oct. 20, 1935, in Shebel Abo, a village north of Addis Ababa in what was then Shewa Province. That same month, Italian forces in Eritrea invaded Ethiopia, setting off the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Her father, Gofe Heye, was a farmer who died in the fighting.Ms. Gobena and her mother, Wosene Biru, went to live with her grandparents. When she was 10 her family arranged for her to marry a much older man, but she ran home soon after the ceremony. Her family returned her to her husband, who kept her locked in a room at night.Ms. Gobena managed to escape through a hole in the roof and made her way to Addis Ababa, where she found a family to take her in. She attended school and later found work as a quality control inspector with a company that exported coffee and grain.The job afforded her a stable, middle-class life, but after establishing Agohelma she lived in near poverty. She never took a salary, and her bedroom was attached to one of the orphanage dormitories.Ms. Gobena — known to many as Emaye, an Amharic word that loosely translates as “Wonderful Mother” — did not simply raise the children under her charge. Along with their classroom education, she made sure that they learned marketable skills, like metalworking, embroidery and, more recently, photography. She gave the older children seed money to start their own businesses.“I don’t have words to describe Emaye; she was my everything,” said Rahel Berhanu, a former Agohelma orphan, in an interview with the magazine Addis Standard. “After getting my diploma, I started working with her. She was a mother above mothers.’’Ms. Gobena did not leave any immediate survivors, though she might disagree.“I have no children of my own,” she told The Times of London in 2004, “but I have a family of hundreds of thousands, and I have absolutely no regrets.”

She argued that categorizing premenstrual syndrome or feelings of guilt as disorders resulted from sexism in a field dominated by men.Paula Caplan, a pioneering psychologist who exposed how her profession had pathologized a wide range of female traits and social responsibilities, including motherhood, menstruation and even shopping, died on July 21 at her home in Rockville, Md. She was 74.Her daughter, Emily Stephenson, said the cause was metastatic melanoma.Starting in the late 1970s, Dr. Caplan merged a rigorous clinical analysis with a fierce feminist perspective to show how many of the problems that psychologists said were innate to women — and especially mothers — had in fact resulted from social structures and discrimination that forced them into difficult situations, then medicalized their inevitably negative responses.For example, in a 1984 article, “The Myth of Women’s Masochism” (and in a subsequent book by the same title), she took aim at Sigmund Freud and his acolytes, who said women suffered from “moral masochism” — that is, that they took pleasure in the frustrations and guilt that often arose from their roles as mothers and spouses.Dr. Caplan demolished Freud’s claim, first by pointing out that most women get no joy out of such pain, and then by showing how such frustration and guilt were often the results of unfair expectations placed on them by a patriarchal society.“She was a great defender of women’s honor,” said Phyllis Chesler, who is also a feminist psychologist and the author of “Women and Madness” (1972). “The image of women as vicious and cruel, she sought to repair that.”Dr. Caplan, the author of 11 books, was perhaps best known for her seven-year battle with the American Psychiatric Association as it planned the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the encyclopedic guide used by millions of doctors to make diagnoses and by insurers to pay for them.She took particular issue with the decision by the manual’s editors to include “premenstrual dysphoric disorder,” in effect a lengthy or intense instance of premenstrual syndrome. Dr. Caplan argued that because P.M.S. was the natural result of a woman’s fluctuating hormone levels, it stood to reason that some women would experience it more strongly than others, in the same way that varying levels of testosterone made some men more aggressive than others.“If they had made a decision suddenly pathologizing a half million men, there would be a public outcry,” she told The New York Times in 1994. “I was so deeply disturbed by the lack of concern with scientific support for what they were including or rejecting, and the low level of apparent concern for the effects on patients who might get these diagnoses.”Half in jest, she proposed that the manual include “delusional dominating personality disorder” for men with high testosterone levels. The editors rejected her proposal, which, she said, just proved her point — and showed that they had no sense of humor.Still, she continued to attack the way her profession treated women, especially as the proliferation of antidepressants in the 1990s made diagnosis lucrative for medical professionals and insurers.“In our increasingly psychiatrized world,” she wrote in The Washington Post in 2012, “the first course is often to classify anything but routine happiness as a mental disorder, assume it is based on a broken brain or a chemical imbalance, and prescribe drugs or hospitalization.”Her experience opened the door to a broader critique of her profession — namely, what she saw as an urge to pathologize everyday human emotions. In fact, she argued, doing so could do more harm than good by encouraging healthy people to think they were sick.“She had a major impact that keeps growing on the psychology of women,” Lenore E. Walker, a psychologist and the author of “The Battered Woman” (1979), said in a phone interview. “The body of work she left behind is classic.”Paula Joan Caplan was born on July 7, 1947, in Springfield, Mo., to Jerome and Theda Ann (Karchmer) Caplan. Her mother was a clinical psychologist, her father a businessman.Dr. Caplan attended Radcliffe College, now part of Harvard, where she intended to become a journalist. But she was rejected from the nearly all-male staff of The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, an experience she chalked up to sexism. At the same time, in her English classes she found herself more interested in the psychological rather than strictly literary analysis of fictional characters, and she decided to change pursuits.She received her master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology from Duke and moved to Toronto in 1974 after her husband, Marcel Kinsbourne, found a job there.The couple divorced in 1978. A previous marriage also ended in divorce. Along with her daughter, Dr. Caplan is survived by her son, Jeremy; her brother, Bruce; and five grandchildren.After moving to Canada, Dr. Caplan was a psychologist for the Toronto Family Court for three years. Among her first efforts was a study of assertiveness among girls and boys, following on the work of the prominent German American psychologist Erik Erikson, in which he had concluded that boys were innately more assertive than girls.Dr. Caplan showed otherwise. Focusing on very young children and diminishing the presence of adults in the room during the study, she demonstrated that it was gendered socialization, not biology, that made girls act less assertively than boys.Dr. Caplan was a professor at the University of Toronto from 1979 to 1995 and head of its Center for Women’s Studies in Education from 1985 to 1987. She later taught at American University, the University of Rhode Island, Brown University and, most recently, Harvard, where she ran the Voices of Diversity Project at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.Dr. Caplan’s work extended beyond academic psychology. An actor since high school, she had small parts in TV shows and commercials, only some of which had anything to do with her intellectual pursuits.She wrote plays and directed documentary films, including “Isaac Pope: The Spirit of an American Century” (2019), about a Black man who had served in the Army under her father in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II.The film was of a piece with her latest interest, veterans and specifically those deemed to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis she largely rejected. There was nothing pathological about having a strong, even debilitating reaction to the horrors of war, she said, and our desire to medicalize those reactions made it possible for nonveterans to ignore just how terrible war could be.“Leaving this work to psychotherapists alone may be not only harmful to the soldiers but also dangerous for us as a nation,” she wrote in The Washington Post in 2004. “It helps hide the consequences of combat, making it easier for us to go to war again the next time.”

He explored how viruses multiply. An accomplished administrator, he also turned the Howard Hughes Medical Institute into a global biomedical powerhouse.Purnell Choppin, whose research on how viruses multiply helped lay the foundation for today’s fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, died on July 3 at his home in Washington, one day shy of his 92nd birthday.His daughter, Kathleen, said the cause was prostate cancer.Dr. Choppin, who was born, raised and educated in Louisiana, arrived at Rockefeller University in Manhattan in 1957, just as a global influenza outbreak reached the city. He isolated six strains of the virus, including one from his own throat, which were used to develop anti-viral agents.He then set himself on a decades-long mission to discover how viruses multiplied. He was among the first to show how they invade cells and turn them into factories to produce more viruses, work that was seminal in vaccine development.Dr. Choppin (pronounced show-PAN) focused on measles and influenza, but his research, and the methods he developed to conduct it, proved critical for later work on other viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, the virus behind the Covid-19 pandemic, said David Baltimore, an emeritus professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology and a winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.“The issue of how viruses infect cells was very much on his mind, and the mechanisms he worked out studying influenza were central to thinking about coronaviruses,” Dr. Baltimore said. “Thanks to his work and that of so many others, when the pandemic hit, we were able to formulate questions about the virus in quite precise terms.”Dr. Choppin was equally well known as an administrator, first at Rockefeller and then at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which hired him in 1985 as its chief medical officer. He later ran the institute for 12 years, turning it from a modest-size research organization into a global research powerhouse.His death elicited an outpouring of remembrances from some of the highest-profile figures in medicine, including Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.“With Purnell’s passing,” he said, “we have lost one of our pre-eminent physician-scientists and research administrators.”Dr. Choppin, left, in 1994 in the atrium of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md., where he was its president. With him, from left, were C.F. Wolfe, vice president; and their colleagues Nina Scherago, Lillian Blucher and Ellen Safir. Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesGeorge Purnell Whittington Choppin was born in Baton Rouge, La., on July 4, 1929. His father, Arthur Choppin, was a chemistry professor at Louisiana State University, and his mother, Eunice (Bolin) Choppin, taught high school.As well as his daughter, his wife, Joan, survives him.After he took over at the Hughes Institute, Dr. Choppin liked to tell his colleagues a story about meeting their famously reclusive benefactor. In 1938, Hughes, an accomplished aviator as well as an industrialist, was stopping in Baton Rouge to refuel, and Arthur Choppin took 9-year-old Purnell and his brother, Arthur Jr., to see him. They shook hands, but, he said, his primary memory was that Hughes was “very tall.”Dr. Choppin graduated from high school at 16 and entered L.S.U., where he also attended medical school. He received his doctorate in 1953 and completed his residency at Washington University. He served in the Air Force, in Japan, from 1954 to 1955.He began at Rockefeller University as a postdoctoral fellow and was named a professor in 1959. He later moved into administration, and was a vice president and dean of graduate studies when the Howard Hughes Medical Institute hired him away.Howard Hughes had founded the institute in 1953, and later transferred his entire holdings in the Hughes Aircraft Company to it, for tax purposes, creating an awkward arrangement in which a medical-research nonprofit owned one of the country’s largest defense contractors.Just weeks before Dr. Choppin arrived, the institute sold the company to General Motors for $5.2 billion, immediately making it one of the country’s wealthiest philanthropies.In 1987, the institute’s president was forced to resign after a financial scandal, and Dr. Choppin was named to replace him. Over the next decade he built it into a leading source of funding for biomedical research, doling out some $4.5 billion to hundreds of scientists as well as for undergraduate and high school science education.With a calm, easygoing demeanor that disguised a fierce, visionary ambition, Dr. Choppin took an innovative approach to funding. Unlike other institutions, which provide grants for specific projects, he focused on identifying top researchers and then showering them with money and resources. Even better, he did not ask them to move to the institute, in Chevy Chase, Md. — they could stay where they were and let the Hughes largesse come to them.Dr. Choppin and his wife, Joan Choppin, during an event in 2010 at Rockefeller University in Manhattan, where he had been a leading research scientist. Dr. Choppin thought that doing so was less disruptive and made for better science, but it also made for great advertising, promoting the Hughes brand throughout the research world.It worked. In 1988 The Washington Post called the institute “the modern version of the 15th century Medici family of Florence,” adding that “instead of art, the focus is medical science.”Science magazine wrote that in Dr. Choppin’s hands, the presidency of the Hughes Institute was “the most influential biomedical research job in the world.”While Dr. Choppin was sometimes criticized for making safe bets on established scientists who probably didn’t need his help, he made no apologies, and had the track record to prove the soundness of his approach: Dozens of Hughes researchers had gone on to become members of the National Academy of Sciences, and six won the Nobel Prize.“We bet on people who look like they are going to be winners,” he told The Washington Post in 1988. “You look for originality. How they pick a problem and stick to it. Their instinct for the scientific jugular.”

She fought for a more compassionate health care system, bringing an extensive knowledge of policy and even more extensive firsthand experience as a patient.Erin Gilmer, a lawyer and disability rights activist who fought for medical privacy, lower drug prices and a more compassionate health care system as she confronted a cascade of illnesses that left her unable to work or even get out of bed for long stretches, died on July 7 in Centennial, Colo. She was 38.Anne Marie Mercurio, a friend whom Ms. Gilmer had given power of attorney, said the cause was suicide.First in Texas and later in Colorado, where she had her own law practice, Ms. Gilmer pushed for legislation that would make health care more responsive to patients’ needs, including a state law, passed in 2019, that allows pharmacists in Colorado to provide certain medications without a current prescription if a patient’s doctor cannot be reached.She was a frequent consultant to hospitals, universities and pharmaceutical companies, bringing an extensive knowledge of health care policy and even more extensive firsthand experience as a patient.At conferences and on social media, she used her own life to illustrate the degradations and difficulties that she said were inherent in the modern medical system, in which she believed patients and doctors alike were treated as cogs in a machine.Her conditions included rheumatoid arthritis, Type 1 diabetes, borderline personality disorder and occipital neuralgia, which produces intensely painful headaches. Her lengthy medical file presented a challenge to doctors used to addressing patients in 15-minute visits, and she said she often found herself dismissed as “difficult” simply because she tried to advocate for herself.“Too often patients have to wonder: ‘Will they believe me?’” she wrote on Twitter in May. “‘Will they help me? Will they cause more trauma? Will they listen and understand?’”She spoke often about her financial difficulties; despite her law degree, she said, she had to rely on food stamps. But she acknowledged that her race gave her the privilege to cut corners.“In the months when I couldn’t figure out how to make ends meet, I would disguise myself in my nice white-girl clothes and go to the salad bar and ask for a new plate as if I had already paid,” she said in a 2014 speech to a medical conference at Stanford University.“I’m not proud of it, but I’m desperate,” she added. “It’s survival of the fittest. Some patients die trying to get food, medicine, housing and medical care. If you don’t die along the way, you honestly wish you could, because it’s all so exhausting and frustrating and degrading.”She could be fierce, especially when people presumed to explain her problems to her or offer a quick-fix solution. But she also developed a following among people with similarly complicated health conditions, who saw her as both an ally and an inspiration, showing them how to make the system work for them.“Before, I thought I didn’t have a choice,” Tinu Abayomi-Paul, who became a disability rights activist after meeting Ms. Gilmer in 2018, said by phone. “She was the first to show me how to address the institution of medicine and not be written off as a difficult patient.”Ms. Gilmer highlighted the need for trauma-informed care, calling on the medical system to recognize not only that many patients enter the intimate space of a doctor’s office already traumatized but also that the health care experience can itself be traumatizing. Last year she wrote a handbook, “A Preface to Advocacy: What You Should Know as an Advocate,” which she shared online, for free.“She expected the system to fail her,” said Dr. Victor Montori, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic and a founder of the Patient Revolution, an organization that supports patient-centered care. “But she tried to make it so the system didn’t fail other people.”Ms. Gilmer in 2016. She used her own life in her advocacy work to illustrate the degradations and difficulties that she said were inherent in the modern medical system.Erin Michelle Gilmer was born on Sept. 27, 1982, in Wheat Ridge, Colo., a Denver suburb, and grew up in nearby Aurora. Her father, Thomas S. Gilmer, a physician, and her mother, Carol Yvonne Troyer, a pharmacist, divorced when she was 19, and she became estranged from them.In addition to her parents, Ms. Gilmer is survived by her brother, Christopher.Ms. Gilmer, a competitive swimmer as a child, began to develop health problems in high school. She had surgery on her jaw and a rotator cuff, her father said in an interview, and she also developed signs of depression.A star student, she graduated with enough advanced placement credits to skip a year of college at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She studied psychology and economics, and she graduated summa cum laude in 2005.She decided to continue her education, at the University of Colorado’s law school, to keep her student health insurance — “a cruel joke,” she said in a 2020 interview with Dr. Montori. She focused on health law and human rights, training herself to be both a policy expert and an activist; she later called her blog Health as a Human Right.She received her degree in 2008 and moved to Texas, where she worked for the state government and a number of health care nonprofits. She returned to Denver in 2012 to open her own practice.By then her health was beginning to decline. Her existing conditions worsened and new ones appeared, exacerbated by a 2010 accident in which she was hit by a car. She found it hard to work a full day, and eventually most of her advocacy was virtual, including via social media.For all her mastery of the intricacies of health care policy, Ms. Gilmer said what the system needed most was more compassion.“We can do that at the big grand levels of instituting trauma-informed care as the way to practice,” she said in the interview with Dr. Montori. “And we can do that at the small micro levels of just saying: ‘How are you today? I’m here to listen. I’m glad you’re here.’”If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You can find a list of additional resources at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.

After working with wounded Israeli soldiers in the 1970s, he developed a holistic approach to helping patients regain some semblance of the life they had before.Yehuda Ben-Yishay, a psychologist whose experience working with wounded Israeli soldiers led him to make pioneering advances in treating traumatic brain injuries, helping countless patients return to some semblance of the life they had before, died on March 24 at the NYU Langone Health hospital in Manhattan. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his wife, Myrna Ben-Yishay, a genetic counselor.Before Dr. Ben-Yishay developed what he called holistic cognitive therapy in the 1970s, most scientists thought that the adult brain was immutable, and that serious injuries — and the behavioral changes that resulted — were permanent.Working with Leonard Diller, his colleague at Rusk Rehabilitation at NYU Langone Health, Dr. Ben-Yishay proved otherwise, setting aside the biology of the brain to show that things like attention, memory and behavior could still be strengthened, or compensated for, in recovering patients.The two first demonstrated their ideas in Israel, where hundreds of soldiers, many of them tank drivers, had suffered traumatic brain injuries in the sprawling tank battles across the Sinai Desert and in the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.They engaged about a dozen patients in what Dr. Ben-Yishai described as a therapeutic milieu. It wasn’t enough for a doctor to work one-on-one with a patient; everyone from nurses to families to other patients had to be involved in creating a safe environment in which a patient could address a brain injury and its consequences and start to regain or compensate for damaged cognitive skills.The two doctors returned to New York and in 1978 Dr. Ben-Yishay put their experience into practice with the NYU Rusk Holistic Day Program. A talented storyteller with a flair for drama, he was renowned for his ability to engage with patients, and he personally treated hundreds over the next four decades.“The scientific community’s work is irrelevant to what goes on here,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2000. “The rehabilitation of head-injured individuals is a clinical, creative endeavor. Can you really say how this blob of Jell-O creates all this wonderful feeling and thinking? No. The question really is, Can you reconstruct Humpty Dumpty after he has been shattered to pieces?”The process isn’t easy, or cheap. Dr. Ben-Yishay’s 20-week program involves daylong sessions, often in small groups, and costs about $60,000. Yet it has become the gold standard for treating brain injuries, inspiring similar programs worldwide.“I was giving a talk about my program in Amsterdam,” said Keith Cicerone, the retired director of cognitive rehabilitation at the JFK Medical Center in New Jersey. “Afterward, several people from around the world came up to me and said how similar their programs were. Pretty soon we realized that we had copied from Yehuda.”Yehuda Ben-Yishay was born on Feb. 11, 1933, in Cluj, a city in the Transylvania region of western Romania. His father, Chaim Ben-Yishay, was a businessman; his mother, Leah (Finkelstein) Ben-Yishay, was a seamstress.His family went through World War II largely unscathed. Though hundreds of thousands of fellow Romanian Jews died during the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands survived, especially those in the southern reaches of Transylvania, where the family had moved shortly before the war.The Ben-Yishays were eager Zionists, and in 1946 they boarded a converted cattle ship with about 2,000 other Jews bound for Palestine. The British authorities had banned such mass migration, and on arrival Yehuda he and his two brothers and sister were separated from their parents as they were placed in refugee camps.After Israel’s independence in 1948, Dr. Ben-Yishay served in the Nahal, a part of the Israel Defense Force that built agricultural settlements. He later attended Hebrew University in Jerusalem, hoping to study psychology, but there was no one to teach it: Arab guerrillas had murdered the head of the department and several colleagues in 1948.Dr. Ben-Yishay studied sociology instead, graduating in 1957. He won a scholarship to the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and arrived at the end of that year.To cover his living expenses, he taught Hebrew and worked with retirees, including at a summer camp in Brewster, N.Y. There he met Myrna Pitterman; they married in 1960 and had three sons, Ari, Ron and Seth. All survive him along with his brothers, Yisrael and Meir; his sister, Pnina; and eight grandchildren.At the New School, Dr. Ben-Yishay fell under the guidance of a German émigré psychologist named Kurt Goldstein. Dr. Goldstein insisted that patients with traumatic injuries could recover only in a “holistic” environment, which would take into account not only their physical well-being but also their emotional and spiritual health.Dr. Ben-Yishay joined the Rusk Institute in 1964 and received his Ph.D. in psychology from N.Y.U. three years later. The institute’s founder, Howard A. Rusk, was himself a pioneer in physical rehabilitation, and like Dr. Goldstein he believed in a “whole patient” approach. (He was also a medical columnist for The New York Times.)Dr. Rusk encouraged Dr. Ben-Yishay and Dr. Diller, who ran the psychology department at Rusk, to apply that same approach to brain injuries, an increasingly urgent field. Thanks to improvements in automobile safety and battlefield medicine, more people were surviving accidents and combat incidents but with significant, if not always obvious, damage to their brains.Dr. Ben-Yishay confronted what was then considered a philosophical question: What is the nature of recovery? Is it strictly neurological, a result of biological changes in the brain? Or is it also behavioral, psychological, a result of learning and outside intervention by doctors, friends and family?Most researchers assumed it was the former, and that little could be done, aside from isolated efforts to make life easier for patients whom they thought were destined to live a life of mental anguish. Dr. Ben-Yishay thought otherwise, that cognition — things like memory, attention, reasoning — could be relearned or strengthened after a brain injury, and he spent the better part of the 1970s developing his approach.Though he faced significant skepticism at first, his program showed results. Before he began, only about 20 percent of patients with traumatic brain injuries were able to go back to work in some capacity; about two-thirds of patients who worked with Dr. Ben-Yishay and his team could do so, he estimated.Dr. Ben-Yishay was always quick to note the limits to his program. He was not there to cure a patient; no one could.“Once brain-injured, you are always brain-injured, for the rest of your life,” he told The Times in 2006.What he could do, though, was help patients develop ways to compensate, which began with recognizing what had happened to them and committing to the hard work of building a new life. He used words like persistence and courage to describe the key to success in his program, and he helped his patients unlock those qualities within themselves.“If you are a sourpuss,” he liked to say, “you are not rehabilitated.”