He was at the forefront in persuading the American Psychiatric Association to reassess its classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder.In February 1973, when it was his turn to speak before an American Psychiatric Association panel on why it should stop classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder, Charles Silverstein chose an unexpected tool for his response: humor.“What I did,” he recalled decades later in an interview for the Rutgers Oral History Archives, “was write a parody, a satire, of all the absurd things that the American Psychiatric Association had diagnosed” — illnesses like “syphilophobia” (irrational fear of syphilis).“I threw back at them their diagnoses over the decades and how funny it all sounds now, and pointed out that their fun had hurt a lot of people,” Dr. Silverstein told The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy in 2003. “I ended by saying to them, ‘Don’t do it anymore.’”The testimony of Dr. Silverstein, who at the time was completing his Ph.D. work in social psychology at Rutgers University, helped persuade the psychiatric association to change the language in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders later that year. That revision, while not completely ending the profession’s pathologizing of homosexuality, was a watershed moment that led to further reassessments.“A.P.A.’s 1973 diagnostic revision was the beginning of the end of organized medicine’s official participation in the social stigmatization of homosexuality,” Dr. Jack Drescher wrote in the journal Behavioral Sciences in 2015.It was also the beginning of an influential career for Dr. Silverstein. He went on to write books — like “The Joy of Gay Sex,” with the novelist Edmund White, and “A Family Matter: A Parents’ Guide to Homosexuality” — served as founding editor of The Journal of Homosexuality, and worked to break down prejudices associated with being gay.“The Joy of Gay Sex,” a manual for men who have sex with men, ran into censorship issues after it was released in 1977.Dr. Silverstein died at 87 on Jan. 30 at his home in Manhattan. The cause was lung cancer, his executor, Aron Berlinger, said.About the time Dr. Silverstein was giving that crucial presentation in 1973, he was also starting the Institute for Human Identity, to provide mental health services to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender clients. In a post on the institute’s website, Tara Lombardo, its executive director, called him “a fearless fighter for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the mental health needs of our community.”“We truly stand on his shoulders,” she wrote.Reflecting on Dr. Silverstein’s impact, Dr. Drescher, a gay psychiatrist who has spoken out against conversion therapy, said by email:“Although I was not yet in medical school when Charles was already advocating for me, I can say without hesitation that my own career in psychiatry and psychoanalysis would not have been possible without his contributions. Many of us owe him a deep debt of gratitude — but Charles’s generosity was such that he never acted like anyone owed him anything.”Charles Silverstein was born on April 23, 1935, in Brooklyn. His father, Sam, delivered newspapers by truck, and his mother, Ida (Berlly) Silverstein, was a homemaker.He mainly grew up in New York, although there was a moment when he was 11 that almost made him a Californian while introducing him to discrimination. His father was offered a job in California by a former co-worker, but when the family arrived on the West Coast after a nine-day drive, they were welcomed less than hospitably.“The other men in the shop came to the foreman and said, ‘Either you get rid of that Jew, or we go on strike,’” Dr. Silverstein recalled in an oral history recorded for The Outwords Archive in 2018. His parents received a refund of the deposit they had put down on a house, loaded the family back into the car and made the long trip back to New York.Dr. Silverstein said he first realized that he was gay when he was a teenager, but his advocacy was still years in the future. In his early attempts at psychoanalysis, he said, he specifically asked to be “cured.”“I was very much the kind of person who had this low self-esteem, depression and feelings of shame that I wrote about later,” he said.Charles Silverstein with his partner William Bory, who died of complications from AIDS in 1993.via Rutgers Oral History ArchivesHe graduated from the State University of New York at New Paltz with an education degree in 1959 and taught elementary school for six years in Larchmont, N.Y., before deciding to become a psychologist. He studied clinical psychology at the City University of New York for three years but failed the comprehensive exams; he ultimately earned his Ph.D. in social psychology at Rutgers in 1974.Dr. Silverstein said he did not have his first experience with gay sex until the late 1960s, when he was in his early 30s. The experience, with a man he had met at a gay bar in Greenwich Village, soon transformed him from a closeted gay man who wanted to be “cured” into a gay activist.“I dropped my analyst, and I joined the Gay Activists Alliance,” he said in the Outwords oral history. “That’s an organization that many people will tell you it saved their lives, and I think it did for me.”The alliance began challenging the psychiatric profession over its views on homosexuality, and Dr. Silverstein was one of the several members who gave testimony in the 1973 session.In 1977, he and Mr. White, who was still early in his career as a novelist, produced the first edition of “The Joy of Gay Sex,” seeking to capitalize on the popularity of “The Joy of Sex,” which was first published in 1972. “The Joy of Gay Sex,” a manual for men who have sex with men, was explicit in its language and its illustrations and ran into censorship issues, especially in Canada.Within a few years the book seemed out of step with the AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s. In 1992, Dr. Silverstein and Felice Picano published a revised edition, “The New Joy of Gay Sex,” that took into account safe-sex practices and newly relevant topics like writing wills.In 1993, Dr. Silverstein’s partner of 20 years, William Bory, died of complications of AIDS, a painful episode that Dr. Silverstein wrote about in his memoir, “For the Ferryman: A Personal Journey” (2011). His other books include “Man to Man: Gay Couples in America” (1981) and “Gays, Lesbians and Their Therapists” (1991).Dr. Silverstein’s marriage to Bill Bartelt ended in divorce. He is survived by a son he recently adopted, Shahrukh Khalique, and a brother, Robert.Dr. Silverstein reissued “For the Ferryman” last year. In a preface to the new edition, he noted the progress made on the issues that concerned him, but also cautioned about complacency.“There are still religious groups that claim they can ‘cure’ us,” he wrote. “State legislatures often vote on bills to take away our rights, and make no mistake, most Americans would like to do just that.”Most L.G.B.T.Q. groups, he said, had become service oriented, had acquired tax-exempt status and “have to keep their noses clean and eschew politics.”“It has led to listlessness in the L.G.B.T. movement,” he wrote. “One wonders whether to call it a movement any longer.”

She was a prominent figure in the field of childhood cancer when, in 1974, she helped create the first Ronald McDonald House in Philadelphia.Dr. Audrey E. Evans, a pediatric oncologist in Philadelphia who, seeing that her out-of-town patients’ families sometimes struggled to find affordable accommodations when their children needed extended care helped create the first Ronald McDonald House, a concept that has blossomed into a worldwide network, died on Thursday at her home in Philadelphia. She was 97.Ronald McDonald House Charities announced her death. Susan Campbell, chief executive officer of that organization’s Philadelphia-region operations, called Dr. Evans “a pioneering pediatric oncologist who cared deeply about children and their families.”Dr. Evans was a renowned figure in the world of childhood cancer. In 1971 she developed what has become known as the Evans Staging System, a protocol for assessing patients with neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer that involves nerve cells. The system helps determine which children need aggressive treatments and which could be aided with less invasive methods.“More than any other person during the last three decades,” a 2000 article in a cancer journal said of her, “she has transformed our thinking about neuroblastoma.”To countless families, though, Dr. Evans was just as important for having helped create Ronald McDonald Houses, lodgings near medical centers where families can stay at little cost while their children receive treatment.She was chief of pediatric oncology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and had been pondering how to help families who brought their children from afar for care when she connected with an unlikely ally, the Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League — unlikely because Dr. Evans, who was born in England, had no idea what the Eagles or American football were.Fred Hill, a tight end on the Eagles from 1965 to 1971, began raising money for leukemia when he found out that his daughter Kim had the disease. Teammates and the team’s owner, Leonard Tose, got involved, and after a particularly successful fund-raiser the team went looking for a local cause that would be visible to the people who had donated, rather than just giving the money to a national leukemia organization.Jim Murray, then Mr. Tose’s right-hand man and later the team’s general manager, recalled that another doctor referred him to Dr. Evans. When he introduced himself, he said in a phone interview, he had to explain that the Eagles were the local pro football team.That didn’t mean much to her, since she was unfamiliar with the sport, but Mr. Murray got her full attention when he told her he had some money to put toward a charitable cause. She thought of the families of her patients, who would sometimes sleep in their cars or hospital hallways when they brought their children in for treatment. She said she’d love to see a house where these families could stay.Mr. Murray approached an adman, Don Tuckerman, who handled the account for Philadelphia-area McDonald’s restaurants, which were promoting Shamrock Shakes at the time, and asked if the franchises might donate 25 cents to the cause for each one sold. Instead McDonald’s offered all the proceeds from that promotion, with the proviso that the Philadelphia house be named after the company’s familiar clown character, and then took the program national.The original Ronald McDonald House opened on Spruce Street in Philadelphia in 1974. Now, the Ronald McDonald House Charities said, there are 380 houses across the United States and in other countries.Dr. Evans, an Episcopalian, often spoke of feeling called by God to care for children. Mr. Murray also sees a higher hand in their unlikely pairing.“I couldn’t cut open a frog,” he said. “I couldn’t even pass biology, and here I was talking to all these doctors.”“She didn’t know what the Eagles were,” he added, “but God put us together.”The first Ronald McDonald House opened on Spruce Street in Philadelphia in 1974. The program has since gone worldwide.RMHC Philadelphia RegionAudrey Elizabeth Evans was born on March 6, 1925, in York, England, to Leonard and Phyllis (Miller) Evans. Her father worked in paper products manufacturing.“I always knew I wanted to be a doctor,” she said in an interview for a 2017 episode of “Modern Hero,” a documentary series about extraordinary women. “Fortunately, my parents believed that girls should do as well as boys, so off I set.”She graduated from the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh in 1953. A Fulbright fellowship brought her to Boston Children’s Hospital, where she studied with Dr. Sidney Farber, the noted cancer researcher, among others. A drawing on his wall showing a circle of caregivers with the family at the center first got her thinking about how illness affected more than just the patient.“A family with a sick child is a sick family,” she said. “So you must think about everybody — the siblings, the mother, the father, maybe grandmother. You must remember that they’re part of a group.”In 1964 she moved to the University of Chicago, and in 1969 she took the job in Philadelphia, where as chief of pediatric oncology she became known for doing things a little differently. Once, for instance, she realized a young patient might be less resistant to treatment if she were allowed to bring her pet rabbit into the unit. Another child brought a parakeet.“Fortunately, nobody liked oncology,” she said in a recent interview. “The people who run the place would rather not go to the oncology floor. So I got away with things I could do in oncology which I’m sure you couldn’t have done on a healthy ward.”She led the oncology unit for 20 years. When she first arrived, feeling the call to care for children, “there wasn’t much else you could do but care,” she said — the mortality rate for young cancer patients was high. She thought she could at least help them through what was ahead.“I knew a lot of them were going to die,” she said, “and I could talk about dying.”But during her tenure the mortality rate dropped — by 50 percent for neuroblastoma patients, according to many accounts. Meanwhile, Ronald McDonald Houses opened by the dozens. The houses, as she envisioned them, would provide not merely a cheap bed but also home-cooked meals and emotional support as “veteran” families mingled with newcomers.“People in these houses know the trials of having a sick child,” she told U.S. News & World Report in 1981, “and will help if you want to cry and help if you want to celebrate.”After retiring from medicine, Dr. Evans helped found the St. James School in Philadelphia, which seeks to educate students in an “under-resourced neighborhood,” its website says.Dave Kasievich, the head of the school, said that Dr. Evans knew she would be celebrated for her many achievements.“However,” he wrote on the school’s website, “Dr. Evans would often say that ‘caring’ was the most important thing she did.”In 2005, Dr. Evans married her longtime colleague, Dr. Giulio D’Angio. He died in 2018. She is survived by her stepsons, Carl and Peter D’Angio, and several step-grandchildren and step- great-grandchildren.Julia Fisher Farbman, a documentarian and co-creator of the “Modern Hero” series, had known Dr. Evans since childhood. She is now working on a feature film based on Dr. Evans’s life and interviewed her extensively.“When I would go on walks with her,” she said by email, “she would literally stop and smell the roses, cuddle strangers’ babies, hand out dog treats (which she always carried in her purse despite not having a dog), and she’d strike a conversation with anyone who seemed like they were having a bad day. If you asked her why, she would say, ‘We just made that person’s day a little better — that wasn’t so hard now, was it?’”

At Planned Parenthood and other organizations, she worked behind the scenes for reproductive rights and related causes.Ann McGuiness, a behind-the-scenes force in women’s health and reproductive rights who raised vast amounts of money for Planned Parenthood and other groups and then was a founder of the Contraceptive Access Initiative, which seeks to make hormonal birth control more available over the counter, died on Aug. 3 in Albany, N.Y. She was 65.Her family said the cause was leiomyosarcoma, an aggressive cancer.Over the years Ms. McGuiness, who lived in Selkirk, N.Y., south of Albany, applied her considerable skills as a fund-raiser to a variety of organizations, but her passion was women’s issues. Beginning in the mid-1980s she worked for the National Women’s Political Caucus, then for NARAL Pro-Choice America (originally the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws), where she was development director.In 2006 she began a 12-year career at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where Cecile Richards, president of the organization during that time, traveled with her often and experienced her commitment to the cause.“It was simply the movement’s good fortune that she chose to pour her talent and energy into fund-raising,” Ms. Richards said by email. “But make no mistake — she was a great fund-raiser because of her belief in the cause of abortion rights. Her competitive streak — and it was fierce — was because to her the mission was so important.”Betsy Liley, who worked with Ms. McGuiness on fund-raising at Planned Parenthood, remembered her as a tireless colleague.“Ann would arrive at the Manhattan Planned Parenthood Federation of America offices after a couple of hours on the train from her home just south of Albany,” she said by email. “She’d pull this dog-eared list of names out of her pocket or purse. It was handwritten in pencil. Sometimes the list had red wine stains on it from work the night before.”“If your name was on that list,” Ms. Liley added, “you were going to hear from Ann. It could be years later. She was going to figure out how to connect you to the work she dedicated her life to.”Ms. Richards recalled a particular trip with Ms. McGuiness that demonstrated her tenacity.“One day we drove hours through southern Florida, to a remote and splendid villa on the coast, to meet with a potential donor who provided fresh-baked scones but no contribution,” she said. “We laughed all the way back, but Ann wasn’t despondent, she was simply committed. A year later, she got a million-dollar gift from the same woman. She didn’t take no for an answer.”After leaving Planned Parenthood in 2018, Ms. McGuiness helped found the Contraceptive Access Initiative in 2020, working on the continuing effort to make birth control pills and other contraception available to women without a prescription. Dana Singiser, who had worked with her at Planned Parenthood, was another founder of that initiative, though she said Ms. McGuiness was the driving force.“She is one of those unsung heroes — raised literally hundreds of millions of dollars for reproductive rights and justice, and was a key strategist everywhere she worked,” Ms. Singiser said by email. “And she was a motivator to all of us around her — always focused on the mission, not her own profile.”Ann Catherine McGuiness was born on July 27, 1957, in New Britain, Conn. Her mother, Catherine (Jones) McGuiness, taught elementary school, and her father, Edward, was a steamfitter.Ms. McGuiness grew up in Newington, Conn., and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at what is now the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford in 1979. In 1984 she earned a master’s degree in public administration at Columbia University.After working for the National Political Women’s Caucus and for the campaign of the Colorado Democrat Tim Worth, during his successful 1986 run for the United States Senate, Ms. McGuiness joined NARAL in 1987. She worked for that organization for 17 years as a consultant and development director before her move to Planned Parenthood.One important aspect of her work in all her roles, Ms. Richards said, was mentoring a younger generation of fund-raisers for women’s causes.“She understood that her own success would be exponentially greater if there were hundreds more trained and committed as she was,” Ms. Richards said.Ms. McGuiness is survived by her husband, William T. Reynolds; a daughter, Nora McGuiness Reynolds; a son, Nicholas McGuiness Reynolds; two brothers, Patrick and Timothy McGuiness; and a sister, Mary Kate Hallisey.If Ms. McGuiness was passionate about particular causes, she also saw the value of giving in general. In an opinion article for The Times Union of Albany in 2010, when the American economy was still recovering from the recession of the previous three years, she made a plea aimed at non-millionaires.“Private support established schools, libraries, hospitals and firehouses,” she wrote. “As the high unemployment rate persists and the economy stalls, philanthropy will be called upon again to make our communities whole.“Open the letters from your favorite charities. Give and give again. Don’t be concerned that the gifts are not as big as Rockefeller’s. Our gifts have an impact — no matter the size.”

He wrote extensively on gay identity and history, but New Yorkers knew a different side of his work: his campaigns on H.I.V. and other health issues.Jeffrey Escoffier, whose remarkably varied career included helping to shape public health campaigns in New York City and writing extensively on gay identity and how it has been influenced by gay pornography and other factors, died on May 20 in Brooklyn. He was 79.His family said the cause was complications of a fall he took while on his way to teach a class at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.New Yorkers encountered Mr. Escoffier’s work on trains, buses and elsewhere for years, although few knew it. From 1999 to 2015 he was the director of health media and marketing for New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which meant that he was directly involved in numerous public health campaigns. Among other things, he arranged one of the more unusual photography sessions on record.It was for a 2004 poster campaign emphasizing that littering and feeding pigeons and squirrels worsened the city’s rat infestation. The poster showed a rat on its haunches, standing in the shadow of a giant version of itself.“The rat is a relatively small animal, and we wanted to suggest that it’s a big problem,” Mr. Escoffier explained to The Daily News that year. “The shadow really is the shadow that is cast by the rat problem in the city.”Getting an image of a rat, though, wasn’t as easy as you might think.“There are not that many stock photos of rats,” Mr. Escoffier told the newspaper. “We actually had a photo shoot with the rat.”Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner for part of Mr. Escoffier’s tenure, said by email that Mr. Escoffier was “always able to see a new side to a challenging issue or situation — and often to bring out the humor in it.”But long before he was working on the rat problem (as well as H.I.V., West Nile virus, smoking, childhood asthma and other serious health concerns), Mr. Escoffier was a leading voice in gay and lesbian scholarship and theory, both as an editor and as an essayist.In 1972, early in the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement, he founded The Gay Alternative, a publication of the Gay Activists Alliance of Philadelphia. He relocated to San Francisco from Philadelphia in 1977 and 11 years later, after spending much of the 1980s as executive editor of Socialist Review, founded Out/Look: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, which published articles of interest both to gay men and to lesbians, two groups that at the time were often at odds.And he wrote voluminously. Many of his essays, as he put it in the introduction to “American Homo: Community and Perversity,” his 1998 book, “explore the social significance of homosexual emancipation since the end of World War II and the political reaction that it has precipitated in American public life.”That included excavating the pre-Stonewall history of gay life, along with economic and other aspects of it. It also included examining gay pornography, how it had changed over the decades and how it had both reflected and helped to shape gay identity. His most recent essay collection, published last year, was “Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography: The Pornographic Object of Knowledge.”“Jeffrey Escoffier embodied the radical queer public intellectual,” Whitney Strub, an associate professor at Rutgers University-Newark whose books include “Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right” (2010), said by email. “In particular, in such essays as ‘The Political Economy of the Closet,’ he showed how to think and write gay economic history, even when its archives had often been erased or destroyed. Later, his pioneering work on pornography called on scholars to move beyond textual analysis and think about labor, the work behind the bodies onscreen.”Jeffrey Paul Escoffier was born on Oct. 9, 1942, in Baltimore and grew up in Manhattan and on Staten Island. His father, George, was an Army colonel, and his mother, Iris (Miller) Wendel, owned an antique shop.“I had my first homosexual experience at 16 during the summer of 1959,” Mr. Escoffier wrote in “American Homo.” “After that, I thirsted for wild adventure. Growing up on Staten Island, realizing my queerness in its sleepy working-class communities, I viewed Greenwich Village as Shangri-La.”Mr. Escoffier earned a bachelor’s degree at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., and a master’s in international affairs at Columbia University. He moved to Philadelphia in 1970 and did doctoral work in economic history at the University of Pennsylvania.He became president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Gay Activists Alliance soon after arriving in the city. A 1975 article by The Associated Press described him as “a librarian who yesteryear was considered queer, today gay.”“There was a time he wouldn’t have wanted the last fact mentioned,” it continued. “Now he seems to welcome the chance to talk about it and the city’s gay community.”Fifteen years later, in San Francisco, Mr. Escoffier showed just how far the new openness had come. He and his colleagues at Out/Look had organized OutWrite, a conference for gay and lesbian writers. The 1990 conference drew 1,200 people.“We are here to mark the coming-of-age of gay and lesbian literature,” he told The Los Angeles Times.The Out/Look journal lasted until 1992. In 1993 Mr. Escoffier moved to New York, and two years later he joined the city health department as deputy director of the Office of Gay and Lesbian Health, where, among other duties, he helped to shape “Julio and Marisol,” the comic-strip serial that had begun appearing in city subway cars in 1989 as part of an AIDS education campaign. In 1999 he was promoted to the marketing position.Dr. Frieden, his former boss, called him a “kind, gentle, creative man who thoughtfully designed lifesaving public health campaigns.”Dr. Mary T. Bassett, now the New York State health commissioner, said that when she became New York City’s health commissioner in 2014, one of the first things she did was to reach out to Mr. Escoffier.“The Affordable Care Act was about to begin enrollment through the exchange, and I wanted to give New York City residents a tailored campaign,” she said by email. “He got to work. In just two weeks Jeff and his team came with about a dozen images, with the tag line ‘Get Covered!’ Today only 5 percent of NYers are uninsured — and Jeff made sure we hit the ground running.”Mr. Escoffier, who lived in Brooklyn, is survived by three sisters, Lin Boulay, Deirdre Wendel and Leith ter Meulen.Ms. Escoffier was also co-editor of a book about dance and wrote a biography of John Maynard Keynes. Sandra Mullin, an associate commissioner in the health department when Mr. Escoffier was there, said she was dazzled by his eclectic résumé.“He was our Renaissance man,” she said by email.“He was a queer man who lifted people up on his team long before the rest of the world gained D.E.I. consciousness,” she added. “No creative idea was dismissed, even bad ones. He always made them better. And in his way —- whether a hard-hitting tobacco campaign or another installment of the soap opera H.I.V. subway campaign ‘Julio y Marisol,’ Jeffrey helped save lives.”

After her diagnosis of glioblastoma in 2016, she founded an organization that advocated for patients and research.Jessica Morris, who turned her experience with glioblastoma, a deadly brain cancer, into a crusade for more research and a patient-directed approach to treatment, founding the organization Our Brain Bank, died of complications of the disease on Tuesday at her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She was 57.Her husband, Ed Pilkington, a reporter for The Guardian, announced her death to friends and supporters by email, expressing hope that the organization she started “would help keep her flame and this fight alive.”In an opinion essay in The New York Times in 2017, Ms. Morris described a fateful day in January 2016.“I was hiking in upstate New York when I started to feel inexplicably odd,” she wrote. “I wanted to alert my companions that something was wrong, but there was a disconnect between the desire to speak and my ability to do so. Then my eyelids closed and that was that: a full-blown seizure, followed by an ambulance ride off the mountain, and brain surgery two days later.”Glioblastoma is a particularly aggressive type of brain tumor that seems to defy treatment. It is what killed President Biden’s son Beau in 2015 and Senator John McCain in 2017.“Median survival, the point by which half of those with glioblastoma have died, is usually put at 14 months,” Ms. Morris wrote in the essay. “Only one in 20 people survive five years.”She herself made it to that five-year mark, and she used those years to educate herself about the illness and become an advocate for a different approach to treating it, one that didn’t automatically default to surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.“The problem with this regime is that it is, as my neuro-oncologist delicately put it, ‘suboptimal,’” she wrote. “Bluntly, for a vast majority of patients, it doesn’t work.”That neuro-oncologist was Dr. Fabio M. Iwamoto of Columbia University’s Department of Oncology.“She knew then that something needed to be done and that patients like her had enormous power,” Dr. Iwamoto said in a statement. “Despite being busy with the tumor treatments and looking after three children, Jessica found the time and energy to be a pioneering advocate of a new contract between the medical profession and the patient community.”Through Our Brain Bank, the nonprofit she founded, Ms. Morris encouraged treating more than just the tumor.“When you’re suddenly told that you have a condition that is considered terminal,” she said on the podcast the Human Guinea Pig Project in 2019, “the one thing you desperately need is psychological support, and it’s not there.”She also wanted to ensure that patients had access to and funding for second opinions, so that those who were told “nothing can be done” by one doctor might seek out a more aggressive approach if they chose. She herself pursued several novel approaches, her husband said, including an experimental therapy that one of her doctors had suggested, involving an injection of herpes virus into the tumor in the hope of stimulating a defensive response.“Even if I don’t know exactly how particular treatments might work — and nobody really does — it kind of makes sense to try and block as many pathways to the cancer as possible,” Ms. Morris explained on the podcast.Another goal was making it easier for glioblastoma patients to enroll in clinical trials of drugs and therapies. The process of getting into such trials can be cumbersome and frustrating to patients with a limited life expectancy. And since glioblastoma is a complex disease in which each tumor has different characteristics, Ms. Morris and her organization developed an app that patients can use to report symptoms and share information with one another and with medical professionals — as an aid to understanding the disease better.“Patient symptom data is a largely untapped pool of information that can inform researchers, so they can better design treatments,” Ms. Morris said during a 2019 panel discussion on patient-centric treatments. “Involving patients in that process has the added benefit of providing people with the disease to feel they are managing the disease, and not the other way ’round.”Jessica Jane Morris was born on July 22, 1963, in Greenwich, near London. Her father, Bill, was an architect, and her mother, Elizabeth (Villar) Morris, is an artist.Ms. Morris studied history at King’s College, Cambridge, graduating in 1985. She and her family relocated to New York in 2006.In New York she worked as a communication strategist, most recently for FleishmanHillard, a public relations and marketing firm, where she was a senior vice president. Ms. Morris kept a blog during the course of her disease and wrote a book, “All in My Head,” which is to be published this year by Little, Brown.In addition to her husband, whom she married in 1993, and her mother, she is survived by a brother, Ben; a sister, Frances Morris; a son, Felix; and two daughters, Tess and Emma.Dr. Iwamoto noted that Ms. Morris’s commitment to improving the prognosis for glioblastoma continues after her death.“She donated her brain,” he said in a phone conversation. “She was very passionate about research, for her and for everyone else.”

Ms. Cole examined the link between abuse at home and problems in the classroom, and sought to make schools “trauma sensitive.”At a time when many school officials thought the best way to deal with problematic students was to suspend or expel them, Susan F. Cole realized what may seem obvious now: Sometimes, trouble at school meant trauma at home.Beginning in the 1990s, she became a leading voice in the movement to create “trauma-sensitive schools” in her own state, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, ones where the staff understands that abuse, neglect, hunger and other disruptions can affect a student’s in-school experience and behavior.It was a new approach, said Michael Gregory, a clinical professor at Harvard Law School and the managing attorney of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative, which Ms. Cole founded in 2004.“When I first started working with Susan in 2004, no one in schools was talking about trauma,” Professor Gregory said in an email. “We were always in rooms where we had to fight to get this conversation on the table. Now, the discussion about trauma’s impacts on learning is happening everywhere — not only in the United States, but increasingly around the globe. She helped fundamentally shift people’s understanding of who children are and what they need from their schools.”Ms. Cole died of metastatic breast cancer on May 1 at her home in Cambridge, Mass., her son, Ben Eisen, said. She was 72.Ms. Cole’s eureka moment came in the mid-1990s, when she was working as a lawyer for Massachusetts Advocates for Children, which seeks to ensure equal access to education for students who have special needs or face racial, economic or other barriers. She was representing a 15-year-old who had been expelled two years earlier after a fight, at a time when Massachusetts had an unforgiving expulsion policy for disciplinary issues.The boy had been removed from his mother’s care for neglect and from his father’s for abuse and was in foster care. Hoping to have him classified for special-education services to get him back in school, Ms. Cole took him to a psychologist.“She said, ‘Drop all of those other diagnoses; this child has post-traumatic stress disorder,’” Ms. Cole recalled in a 2014 interview with the Harvard Law Bulletin.She began a decades-long examination of the links between education and childhood trauma, using her accumulating experience to identify “broader systemic failures that could not be addressed on a case-by-case basis,” as her husband, David Eisen, put it.Constant stress and fear were more than just a distraction for students; their effect, she learned, was neurological, activating the fight-or-flight survival instinct permanently.“The brain,” she explained to The Durango Herald of Colorado in 2016, “cannot focus when it’s not calm. Children have to feel safe enough to learn.”A report Ms. Cole co-wrote in 2005, along with two subsequent volumes, have served as a guide for schools to create supportive environments for students who have experience trauma.In 2005, the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative, a collaborative effort between Massachusetts Advocates for Children and Harvard Law School, where Ms. Cole was a lecturer, published “Helping Traumatized Children Learn,” an influential report written by Ms. Cole, Professor Gregory and four others.A follow-up volume in 2013 focused more specifically on what schools could do about these issues, and Professor Gregory said a third volume was in the works. In 2014, Massachusetts approved a “safe and supportive schools framework” provision encouraging various trauma-sensitivity measures in schools.“She connected the dots,” Martha Minow, a professor at Harvard University and Harvard Law School and the law school’s former dean, said of Ms. Cole by email. “She showed how teachers and staff equipped with the right information and training can foster vital learning and growth rather than blaming the individual child’s academic and behavior challenges on them.”Susan Frances Cole was born on Aug. 4, 1948, in Chicago. Her father, Harvey, was a bacteriologist who later owned a toy store; her mother, Anne (Tucker) Cole, was a teacher. When Susan was 5 the family moved to Milledgeville, Ga., and later to Macon, Ga.Growing up Jewish in the segregated South impressed upon Ms. Cole “life’s inequities and their consequences,” her son said. After two years at the University of Georgia, she transferred to Boston University, earning a degree in sociology in 1970.Ms. Cole taught at the Fernald State School for people with developmental disabilities in Waltham, Mass., earned a degree in special education at the University of Oregon, and received a law degree from Northeastern University. She worked for the National Labor Relations Board before joining Massachusetts Advocates for Children.Ms. Cole looked not only at the many things — abuse, hunger, neglect, disruption from natural disasters — that might unsettle a child’s life, but also at the cognitive results.“When you come from a home that is very disorganized, sequence and cause and effect can be thrown off,” she told The New York Times in 2013. “This affects language development, memory and concentration. When teachers recognize this, it comes as a relief. Finally the scientists are explaining what they’ve seen firsthand!”But educating teachers and administrators was only the first step.“This is about changing the whole school environment,” she told The Times. “You can have a great trauma-sensitive classroom, but if the child goes into the hall or cafeteria and gets yelled at, he can get retriggered.”Ms. Cole married Mr. Eisen, an architect, in 1986. In addition to him and their son, she is survived by a brother, Stuart.In 2004 Ms. Cole founded the Education Law Clinic at Harvard, where law students learn to represent students who have experienced trauma and to promote relevant legislation.“She empowered not only law students and lawyers but also children themselves as advocates for safe and supportive schools — bringing their voices directly to legislators and other policymakers,” Professor Minow said.One life she changed was that of the 15-year-old she represented in that revelatory 1990s case. Some 20 years later he contacted her, and she sent an email to colleagues asking for suggestions on where she might take him and his new baby to lunch.“He called with gratitude,” that email said in part. “I can’t believe it … pinching myself. I am the one with gratitude. I guess these are the ‘bennies’ of our advocacy work.”