With his wife, Dr. Jean Carruthers, he conducted hundreds of studies on the wrinkle-erasing properties of the neurotoxin that causes botulism. The work revolutionized beauty care.“Pretty Poison,” newspapers called it in the mid-1990s, when the deadly neurotoxin that causes botulism began to make headlines as a temporary wrinkle-eraser.Botulinum toxin was 100 times more virulent than cyanide. For years beginning in World War II, the Defense Department had hoped to develop it as a chemical weapon. But decades later, when Dr. Alan Scott, an ophthalmologist, refined it into a pharmaceutical after discovering its potential to cure conditions like strabismus (crossed eyes) and blepharospasm (involuntary eyelid twitching and clenching), an unlikely byproduct of his treatments was cosmetic: brows as smooth as a child’s.Yet it was not Dr. Scott who pioneered Botox, as it would later be called, as a panacea for aging. It was Dr. Alastair Carruthers, a Canadian dermatologist, and his wife, Dr. Jean Carruthers, an ophthalmologist, who joined forces to investigate its cosmetic use in hundreds of peer-reviewed studies.While Dr. Scott would come to be known as the “Father of Botox,” the Carrutherses were considered its godparents. Dr. Alastair Carruthers died on Aug. 19 at his home in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was 79.Dr. Carruthers, who had advanced Parkinson’s disease, died with the help of Canada’s medical assistance in dying law, his wife said.Dr. Carruthers, right, with Dr. Alan Scott and his wife, Ruth Scott, in 2009. Dr. Scott, who first refined the botulinum toxin into a pharmaceutical, was known as the “Father of Botox.”via Carruthers familyWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

She believed the bond between adults was as sustaining as that between parent and child, and developed a therapy to strengthen and repair broken relationships.Sue Johnson, a British-born Canadian clinical psychologist and best-selling author who developed a novel method of couples therapy based on emotional attachment, challenging what had been the dominant behavioral approach — the idea that behaviors are learned and thus can be changed — died on April 23 in Victoria, British Columbia. She was 76.Her death, in a hospital, was caused by a rare form of melanoma, said her husband, John Douglas.When divorce rates rose in the 1970s, couples therapy blossomed. Drawing from traditional psychotherapy practices, therapists focused mostly on helping distressed couples communicate more effectively, delve into their upbringings and “negotiate and bargain,” as Dr. Johnson put it, over divisive issues like parenting, sex and household chores.In her own practice, however, she became frustrated at how her couples seemed to be stalling out.“My couples didn’t care about insight into their childhood relationships,” she wrote in her book “Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love” (2008), which has sold more than a million copies and been translated into 30 languages. “They didn’t want to be reasonable and learn to negotiate. They certainly didn’t want to be taught rules for fighting effectively. Love, it seemed, was all about nonnegotiables. You can’t bargain for compassion, for connection. These are not intellectual reactions; they are emotional responses.”In conventional therapy that sought to modify behavior, emotions had long been dismissed as problematic in dealing with marital issues — something to be tamed — and dependence on a loved one was seen as a sign of dysfunction.Dr. Johnson thought otherwise. She knew of the attachment studies of John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist who studied children who had been traumatized by being orphaned or separated from their parents during World War II. Later researchers began to focus on adult attachments and noted how secure connections among couples helped them weather the inevitable storms of relationships.Dr. Johnson’s 2008 book has sold more than million copies and been translated into 30 languages. Little, Brown SparkWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

As a childbirth educator and maternal advocate, she promoted a profession that provides comfort to women giving birth and offers postpartum care as well.Penny Simkin, a childbirth educator and author who was often described as the “mother of the doula movement,” died on April 11 at her home in Seattle. She was 85.The cause was pancreatic cancer, said her daughter, Linny Simkin.Ms. Simkin, a physical therapist turned birth educator, was a pioneer in helping women have a better experience during and after birth. Doula is the Greek word for “female servant,” and it was embraced by alternative birth professionals sometime in the 1970s or ’80s to refer to someone who supports mothers during labor. In books, workshops and training organizations, Ms. Simkin helped popularize that role and worked as a doula herself.Doulas are not medical professionals; their role is to provide comfort to women in the delivery room as well as postpartum care at home. That care might include snacks, massages or warm compresses but also more substantive assistance, like suggesting movements to ease labor pains or help with breastfeeding.Ms. Simkin’s innovations included a device called the squatting bar, which is attached to a hospital bed for the mother to hang onto and squat, a position that opens the pelvis and allows gravity to help with the baby’s delivery.Her work came out of the natural childbirth movement of the 1970s, when alternatives to the standard hospital birth were being explored. But she was agnostic about home versus hospital deliveries and about pain-relieving measures. Her focus, always, was on the mother.Ms. Simkin surveyed thousands of women about their birth experiences, to better train doulas in preparing women for childbirth. “How will she remember this?” she exhorted her students.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

She shared the experience of her transition in a documentary to encourage her patients, many of whom were also transgender, to live openly and confidently.In December 1977, Dr. Jeanne Hoff, a 39-year-old psychiatrist, invited a television crew into her Manhattan home. The next day, they would accompany her to the operating room for her gender-affirming surgery.“Becoming Jeanne: A Search for Sexual Identity,” the resulting documentary about Dr. Hoff’s experience, was shown the next spring on NBC, with Lynn Redgrave and Frank Field as the hosts.“It’s a very lonely moment indeed,” Dr. Hoff, a slight figure with shoulder-length brown hair, said that evening. She added, “The things we do to our bodies and our lives are very disturbing to the people around us, and I can see that fear and that confusion written on their face even when they’ve known me a long time.”Her choice to undergo surgery was years in the making. Her choice to go public, however, which could have come at great cost to her livelihood and well-being, was easier. She wanted to make known her own difficulty in finding care, her interactions with doctors who didn’t have enough knowledge of transgender people. She hoped that her experience would inform the medical profession.In those years, the transgender figures in the public eye were few but notable. In the early 1950s, the glamorous Christian Jorgensen’s transition was fizzy tabloid news, though she was denied a marriage license a few years later because her birth certificate identified her as male. In 1974, the travel writer Jan Morris published “Conundrum,” a memoir of her own transition, to some acclaim. And in 1977, Renée Richards, the ophthalmologist and tennis player, had won a court order to play in the women’s division at the U.S. Open.But Dr. Hoff’s television debut was mostly done as an example for her patients. Since many were themselves transgender or gay, it didn’t seem possible, as she put it, for her to encourage them to live openly, confidently and free of shame without doing so herself.Dr. Hoff, perhaps the first openly transgender psychiatrist, died on Oct. 26 at her home in San Francisco. She was 85.The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said Carol Lucas, a friend. Her death, which was not reported at the time, was announced this month by Gay City News.Dr. Hoff had a private practice in Manhattan and, at the time of her transition, had also taken over the practice of Dr. Harry Benjamin, the German-born endocrinologist often described as the father of transgender care in the United States. Yet in the history of that care, Dr. Hoff is not well known, if she is known at all.Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies sexuality, and transgender history in particular, recalled being surprised when she came across Dr. Hoff’s archives, which she had donated to the Kinsey Institute, when she was working on her 2018 book, “Histories of the Transgender Child.”“The idea that in the 1970s a trans woman would be openly practicing as a psychiatrist is revolutionary by itself, when the profession was still struggling to depathologize homosexuality,” Dr. Gill-Peterson said by phone. “But knowing that your psychiatrist understood what it was like to be in your shoes was a tidal shift.”In her research, Dr. Gill-Peterson learned that Dr. Hoff had argued successfully for the release of a Black transgender woman who had been institutionalized from age 15 to 30 because doctors had diagnosed her assertion of her gender identity as “mental retardation,” “delusion” and “sexual perversion.”“Through all the florid language of the reports there is an unmistakable moralistic disapproval of her effeminacy and homosexuality,” Dr. Hoff wrote in her analysis of the woman’s care, “but not the slightest hint that the diagnosis of transsexualism was suspected, even though it was quite evident from the details provided.”In “Becoming Jeanne,” Dr. Hoff talked about the reflexive, though less destructive, sexism of her own doctors, like the surgeon who thought her breast implants should be bigger; he was amazed, she said, that she didn’t want look like a showgirl. At one point in the documentary, Ms. Redgrave asked Dr. Hoff her thoughts about getting married. Dr. Hoff said that she was in a relationship with a man, but that she didn’t think the relationship would survive the transition. (As it happened, it didn’t.)“The marriage market for middle-aged spinsters is not a bull market,” she said. “I’m not going to die of grief if it doesn’t happen to me. I have an interesting occupation. I have a full life with friends who are affectionate and caring.” And that, she added, was “very much better than life was before.”Dr. Hoff was born on Oct. 16, 1938, in St. Louis, the only child of James and Mary (Salih) Hoff. Her father was a laborer and, by the 1950s, was working as a bottler in a brewery. Dr. Hoff didn’t speak very much about her upbringing, though she hinted that it was grim, marked by privation and disapproval, said Ms. Lucas, a friend since the 1980s. Her father, she told Ms. Lucas, was an alcoholic.“I got the sense that she raised herself,” Ms. Lucas said. “She was so smart they didn’t know what to do with her.” Dr. Hoff earned a half scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis, from which she received a B.A. in 1960. She then earned a master’s in science from Yale, followed by an M.D. in surgery from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia in 1963. She returned to Washington University from 1971 through 1976, first as an instructor in pathology and then as a resident in psychiatry.In the 1980s, Dr. Hoff sold her practice and moved to Hudson, in upstate New York. She worked for an outpatient clinic for the state in nearby Kingston, treating severely disabled, long-term psychiatric patients, including schizophrenics. After half a decade or so, she moved to a group practice in Pittsburgh, and finally ended up working in Oakland, Calif., treating the formerly incarcerated through a program with the California Department of Corrections. Her last job was at San Quentin, where she treated prisoners on death row. She retired in 1999, after a prisoner attacked her.“She did not recover well from that trauma,” Ms. Lucas said. “She said she couldn’t get mad, which would allow her to heal, because he was a patient. She would joke about it, ‘I thought it was going to happen today, but it only lasted a few seconds.’ She was enormously compassionate”No immediate family members survive.At the conclusion of “Becoming Jeanne,” Mr. Field asked Dr. Hoff how she would like to be treated. “What can we do, to accept you?”She did not hesitate in her answer. “It may not be necessary for you to go to a lot of trouble to learn about accepting transsexuals if you have a general principle and that is, ‘Mind your own business,’ I suppose. It boils down to that.”

The drugs had been the third rail of scientific inquiry. But in a landmark study, he saw them as a legitimate way to help alleviate suffering and even to reach a mystical state.Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral science and psychiatry whose pioneering work in the study of psychedelics helped usher in a new era of research into those once banned substances — and reintroduced the mystical into scientific discourse about them — died on Monday at his home in Baltimore. He was 77.The cause was colon cancer, said Claudia Turnbull, a longtime friend.Dr. Griffiths, a distinguished psychopharmacologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, spent decades studying the mechanisms of dependence on mood-altering drugs. He published scores of papers on opiates and cocaine, on sedatives and alcohol, on nicotine and caffeine.His work on caffeine, which he noted was the most commonly used drug in the world, was groundbreaking, showing that, yes, it was addictive, that withdrawal could be painful and that caffeine dependence was a “clinically meaningful disorder.”But in August 2006 he published a paper that wasn’t just groundbreaking; it was mind-blowing.The paper had an unusual title: “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.” And when it appeared in the magazine Psychopharmacology, it caused a media ruckus.“The God Pill,” read the headline in The Economist. Here was the first double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical study in decades to examine the psychological effects of a psychedelic on what scientists call “healthy normals” — healthy volunteers. Its focus was not on the beneficial properties of the drug for those suffering from depression, or being treated for cancer, or facing end-of-life terrors, or trying to quit smoking. Those landmark studies would come later.This work involved trained doctors administering high doses of psilocybin — the psychoactive, or mind-altering, component found in the psilocybe genus of mushrooms — to healthy people in a controlled, living room-like setting.Eighty percent of the participants described the experience as among the most revelatory and spiritually meaningful episodes of their lives, akin to the death of a parent or the birth of a child, as Dr. Griffiths often said.Their experience had all the attributes of a mystical event. They described profound feelings of joy, love and, yes, terror, along with a sense of interconnectedness and even an understanding of a sublime, sacred and ultimate reality.Such positive effects on their mood and behavior lasted for months and even years, as the author Michael Pollan discovered when he interviewed many of the participants for his 2018 book, “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.”“To listen to these people describe the changes in their lives inspired by their psilocybin journeys is to wonder if the Hopkins session room isn’t a kind of human transformation factor,” Mr. Pollan wrote.But Dr. Griffiths’s work showed that researchers could do more than induce a mystical experience in a lab; they could also use the tools of science — brain imaging, for example — to prospectively, as he put it, examine the nature of consciousness and of religious experience.As Charles Schuster, a former director of the government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, told The New York Times in 2006, “This represents a landmark study, because it is applying modern techniques to an area of human experience that goes back as long as humankind has been here.”In a phone interview, Mr. Pollan said, “Roland had such a sterling reputation as being a rigorous and conscientious scientist.”“No one of his stature had stepped into this area in such a long time that it gave a lot of other people confidence,” he added. “When he presented this completely weird study, which was so out there for science, it could have been dumped on, but it wasn’t.”Dr. Griffiths’s work, which began in 1999, was endorsed by the Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration as well as a cohort of experts that included the former deputy of the drug czar under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. And it ushered in what many have called a renaissance in psychedelic research.“The fact that psychedelic research was being done at Hopkins — considered the premier medical center in the country — made it easier to get it approved here,” said Anthony P. Bossis, a psychologist specializing in palliative care at New York University.He told Mr. Pollan that Dr. Griffiths’s work had paved the way for him and his colleagues to begin using psilocybin to successfully treat anxiety in cancer patients.Theirs was not the only institution to do so. Similar research involving cancer patients, alcoholics, smokers and sufferers of depression began in earnest in this country and overseas following the publication of Dr. Griffiths’s paper.“It was an amazing study,” Dr. Bossis told Mr. Pollan, “with such an elegant design. And it opened up the field.”Dr. Griffiths spoke at an academic conference in Austin, Texas, in March 2022. He learned he had Stage 4 colon cancer earlier this year. Travis P Ball via Getty Images for SXSWPsychedelics had been the third rail of scientific inquiry ever since Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were thrown out of Harvard for passing out LSD with messianic fervor in the early 1960s. By the end of that decade, psychedelics had been declared controlled substances deemed illegal for recreational and medical use.Yet beginning in the 1950s, well before Dr. Leary exhorted a generation to “turn on, tune in and drop out,” LSD — a synthetic chemical derived from a fungus, along with psilocybin and other psychedelics — were being studied and used successfully to treat alcoholism, depression, anxiety and distress among the terminally ill.The term psychedelic was coined in 1956 and drawn from the Greek root psyche, which translates to mind or soul. Freighted with the counterculture baggage of the 1960s, however, it devolved from its original meaning as a mind-altering drug into an aesthetic rendered in loopy typefaces and black-light posters.Dr. Griffiths was well-suited to bring psychedelics back as a legitimate area of scientific inquiry. Like many students of psychology of his generation, he had been heavily influenced by the work of B.F. Skinner, the “radical behaviorist” who disdained the focus on emotions and the unconscious that had long dominated the field and rather dwelled on the role of environment in determining, or conditioning, human behavior.In 1994, Dr. Griffiths began meditating regularly, which led to a transformative experience that, he said, “profoundly shifted my worldview and got me very curious about the nature of spiritual experiences.”He told Mr. Pollan that the experience was so profound that he nearly quit science to devote himself to a spiritual practice. But, as it happened, others were working to rehabilitate the study of psychedelics. One was Bob Jesse, a former vice president of the software company Oracle, who had established a nonprofit to encourage research on mystical experiences and whose introduction to Dr. Griffiths became the engine for what would soon change the direction of Dr. Griffiths’s research and reinvigorate the field.As researchers in his lab and elsewhere were studying the use of psilocybin in treating cancer patients, smokers and those with depression, he began focusing on examining the mystical aspects of their experiences and plumbing the nature of consciousness. He came to believe that the insights gleaned from psilocybin could have profound effects on humanity, which he saw heading toward disaster.Psychedelics, he suggested, might right the ship.“A hallmark feature of these experiences is that we’re all in this together,” he told The Chronicle of Higher Education in April. “It opens people up to this sense that we have a commonality and that we need to take care of each other.”Roland Redmond Griffiths was born on July 19, 1946, in Glen Cove, N.Y., to William and Sylvie (Redmonds) Griffiths. His father, who had trained as a psychologist, specialized in public health; his mother was a homemaker until the family moved to El Cerrito, Calif., in about 1951, after William had taken a job as a professor of public health at the University of California, Berkeley. There, Sylvie began successfully pursuing a master’s in psychology.Roland majored in psychology at Occidental College in Los Angeles and studied psychopharmacology at the University of Minnesota, earning his Ph.D. there in 1972. Johns Hopkins hired him immediately afterward, and he began concentrating his research on drug use and addiction.Dr. Griffiths is survived by his wife, Marla Weiner; his three children, Sylvie Grahan, Jennie Otis and Morgan Griffiths; five grandchildren; and his siblings, Kathy Farley and Mark Griffiths. His marriage in 1973 to Kristin Ann Johnson ended in divorce, as did his marriage to Diana Hansen.Dr. Griffiths was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer earlier this year, a finding he came to embrace, as he told David Marchese of The New York Times Magazine. He established a foundation at Johns Hopkins to fund research on psychedelics. At his death, he was completing a paper about a study he had conducted in which clergy from a wide range of faiths received a high dose of psilocybin to see how it would affect their life and work.Notably, his laboratory’s first therapeutic study with psilocybin was with cancer patients, but Dr. Griffiths said he waited a bit before using a psychedelic to investigate his own condition. When he did — he took LSD — he approached the session like a reporter, and queried his cancer: What are you doing here? Is this going to kill me?“The answer was,” he told Mr. Marchese, “‘Yes, you will die, but everything is absolutely perfect; there’s meaning and purpose to this that goes beyond your understanding, but how you’re managing that is exactly how you should manage it.’”Long before his cancer diagnosis, Dr. Griffiths told Mr. Pollan that he hoped his own death would not be sudden, that he would have time to savor it. “Western materialism says the switch gets turned off and that’s it,” he said. “But there are so many other descriptions. It could be a beginning! Wouldn’t that be amazing.”Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

A beloved radio and television host, first in Canada and then also in the U.S., she approached the hottest topic with compassion and humor.Sue Johanson, the blunt, bawdy and beloved Canadian sex educator and host of the long-running television call-in program “Sunday Night Sex Show” and its American counterpart, “Talk Sex With Sue Johanson,” died on June 28 at a care facility in North Toronto. She was 92.Her death was confirmed by her daughter Jane Johanson.She dressed demurely, often in blazers and wire-rimmed glasses, but Ms. Johanson had a comedian’s timing and instincts, which defused the hot-button topics she addressed. (A condom evangelist, she had a way of stretching them out in demonstrations that recalled a clown making balloon animals.) And like Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the Holocaust survivor and onetime Israeli sniper turned sex therapist, Ms. Johanson, a registered nurse and mother of three who had run a birth control clinic in a public high school for nearly two decades, became a media star in midlife.“I wasn’t young,” Ms. Johanson said in “Sex With Sue,” a 2022 documentary about her directed by Lisa Rideout, with Jane as her mother’s interlocutor and the film’s creative consultant. “I wasn’t beautiful. I didn’t have bodacious tatas. I was a mother with a load of information.”Is it weird to put body glitter on your boyfriend’s testicles? Is it safe to have sex in a hot tub? Could a Ziploc baggie serve as a condom? If condoms are left in a car and they freeze, are they still good? Answers: No. No (chlorinated water is too harsh for genitals, particularly women’s). Definitely not. And yes, once they’ve been defrosted.Every Sunday night, the questions poured in about straight sex, gay sex and masturbation, along with those detailing all manner of fetishes, fantasies and fears. At the show’s peak in the early 2000s, nearly 100,000 calls were fielded and screened by operators, though only 10 or 12 made it on the air.Manufacturers of sex toys sent their wares by the boxload. Ms. Johanson would divvy them up among her young crew for road tests — “The Unofficial Sex Toy Testing Facility of Canada,” she called them — and demonstrate their features at her desk, reaching into her “hot stuff” bag, a black tote emblazoned with flames, to pull out the latest offerings. “The good, the bad and the ugly,” she liked to say. (Makers tended to gild the lily, like the company that made a vibrator with a camera at its tip. “It gives a whole new meaning to, ‘I’m ready for my close-up,’” Ms. Johanson deadpanned.)A child of the Great Depression, she was thrifty and cost-conscious, and she often presented homemade alternatives. Why not turn your cellphone ringer to vibrate, tuck it in your underpants and have your friends call nonstop?“I remember her giving a hand job to a cucumber,” Russell Peters, the Canadian comedian, said in the documentary. “I never looked at a cucumber the same.”Ms. Johanson in 1995. “I wasn’t young. I wasn’t beautiful,” she once said of her appeal. “I was a mother with a load of information.”Ron Bull/Toronto Star, via Getty ImagesMs. Johanson started her broadcasting career in radio, with a wildly popular show on a rock station that ran for more than a decade. “Sunday Night Sex Show” first aired on Canadian television in 1996. In 2002, the Oxygen network commissioned an American version, which ran right after the Canadian show, so American callers could have their shot. The U.S. audience was shyer and more naïve than her Canadian viewers, Ms. Johanson told Mireya Navarro of The New York Times in 2004; they seemed to lack basic knowledge. Many young female callers wondered if they could get pregnant from oral sex.“Ms. Johanson said she could not ride the subway or stand in a grocery line in Canada without being approached to answer the kind of question that would make even the frozen chicken blush,” Ms. Navarro wrote. “But in the United States, a much bigger market, her growing fan base seems almost bashful but mostly grateful. ‘I find that Americans are so polite and so respectful that being recognized is wonderful,’ she said. ‘People will look at me and say, ‘Hi, I love your show.’ And that’s where it ends.”She was, however, feted on the American talk-show circuit, appearing with Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, whom she terrified with the contents of her hot-stuff bag, which that night included a vibrating rubber duck, a dildo she strapped to her chin and a handmade, hand-operated vibrator she had fashioned from a tin can fitted with Bubble Wrap and a tube sock.“You’re like a perverted MacGyver,” Mr. O’Brien said, horrified.“I regard sex as a gift from God,” Ms. Johanson told Ms. Navarro. “We’re the only ones that really are able to enjoy sex, so we have an obligation to learn about it and enjoy it.”Susan Avis Bailey Powell was born on July 29, 1930, in Toronto. Her mother, Ethel (Bell) Powell, was a homemaker. Her father, Wilfred Bailey Powell, was in the Royal Canadian Air Force and had a number of jobs. Her mother died when she was 10, and she was raised mostly by an aunt.She met Ejnor Karl Johanson, an electrical inspector, on a blind date just before she entered nursing school at the St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg; they married in the early 1950s and moved to Toronto to take over her aunt’s real estate business.Ms. Johanson opened her birth control clinic in 1970, after her eldest daughter’s friend became pregnant in high school and had an abortion, which was at the time mostly illegal in Canada. “Kids get involved with sex without their parents’ consent,” she told a reporter in 1983, “and therefore they should be able to get contraceptives without their consent.”Throughout her career, high school and college students were her biggest concern. She was an indefatigable speaker, a regular at college freshman orientations each fall and at hundreds of high schools each year. Her husband, Jane Johanson said, was a reserved, private man, the opposite of his gregarious wife, but he handled her career and fame with grace, and “took it like a champ.” He died in 2014.In addition to her daughter Jane, Ms. Johanson is survived by another daughter, Carol Howard; two grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. Her son, Eric, died in 2021.Ms. Johanson also wrote a magazine column and was the author of three books: “Sex, Sex and More Sex,” “Sex Is Perfectly Natural but Not Naturally Perfect” and “Talk Sex: Answers to Questions You Can’t Ask Your Parents.”In 2000, she was awarded the Order of Canada, the country’s highest honor for pioneers in their field.Ms. Johanson’s Canadian show went off the air in 2005, and the American version in 2008. It was time: The internet had become the go-to source for sex inquiries. As Dan Savage, the sex columnist, put it in the documentary about Ms. Johanson, there was a Wikipedia page for every piece of equipment and every sex act, and Ms. Johanson felt she was unable to keep up with the times. At 77, she was ready but sad to call it quits.“There will be a great big hole in my heart,” she said as she introduced her final episode in May 2008, her voice breaking.“I love doing this show.”She added, “I’ll close with the same condom quickie that we ended the first show with 174 episodes ago: Sex will be sweeter, if you wrap your peter.”

An ophthalmologist and researcher, he discovered a drug that treated serious eye conditions. It also smoothed wrinkles — and an alternative industry was born.It is a neurotoxin 100 times more deadly than cyanide and the cause of the food-borne illness known as botulism. During World War II and for some years after, the Department of Defense hoped to develop it as a chemical weapon. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that Alan Scott, an ophthalmologist, turned this toxin, Clostridium botulinum, into a pharmaceutical, when he began to investigate it as a medical treatment for serious eye impairments.Little did he know at the time that the therapeutic drug he developed would become the basis of a billion-dollar industry famous for its cosmetic use as a temporary wrinkle eraser.Dr. Scott, who came to be called the “Father of Botox,” died on Dec. 16 at a hospital in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 89. The cause was complications of sepsis, his daughter Alison Ferguson said.When, in 1978, Dr. Scott first injected the powerful paralytic Clostridium botulinum into the eye muscles of a patient who had undergone retinal detachment surgery that had left his eye pulled to one side, he didn’t know who was more nervous, himself or the patient, he told Scientific American magazine in 2016.But the procedure succeeded, and Dr. Scott would go on to refine one of the world’s deadliest poisons into a life-altering treatment — he called it Oculinum — for those who suffered from conditions like strabismus, a misalignment of the eyes.Doctors also began using it to treat migraines and jaw-clenching, among other ailments, and as they did so many of their delighted patients noticed a curious byproduct: The toxin’s ability to paralyze targeted facial muscles smoothed the lines around them, though its effects wore off after a few months.Dr. Scott was amused by the drug’s off-label trajectory under a new name, Botox. His focus on it was always solely therapeutic.“I think that’s a charming, slightly frivolous use,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2002, the year the FDA approved Botox for cosmetic purposes.Dr. Scott and his colleagues had spent decades researching and producing what they called Oculinim. But because they had no patent, no pharmaceutical company would manufacture it, and Dr. Scott resorted to taking out a mortgage on his house and asking for small donations from doctors, who then used it in clinical trials.He and his team had already developed Teflon-coated needles to accurately target muscles with various substances before settling on and then refining the toxin to treat strabismus and blepharospasm, a condition that causes the eyes to involuntarily shut tight. In 1989, the Food and Drug Administration approved it for those uses.Dr. Scott had no wish to continue to be a pharmaceutical manufacturer, and in 1991 he sold the rights to make Oculinum to its distributor, Allergan, for an undisclosed amount. The following year, the company changed the drug’s name to Botox.In the decades that followed, the public’s appetite for it as a facial enhancement exploded. Movie directors began complaining that actors were losing their ability to frown or smile properly — “frozen face” became a trope of the tabloids. It was derided as a pernicious enabler of a youth-obsessed society, a practice best left to the stars of reality television.But practitioners grew more skilled at deploying it, and the age of its adherents kept dropping as more and more women maintained that it was a necessary tool for job security in an ageist culture. Now, Botox is a household name, its use seemingly as common as a facial.A pharmaceutical to treat serious eye impairments, developed by Dr. Scott, was found to have a curious byproduct: an ability to paralyze targeted facial muscles and smooth the lines around them. Thus a billion-dollar cosmetic industry was born. Shannon Stapleton/ReutersAlan Brown Scott was born in Berkeley, Calif., on July 13, 1932. His father, Marion Irving Scott, was a dentist; his mother, Helen Elizabeth (Brown) Scott, worked in a laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.Dr. Scott earned an undergraduate degree in medical sciences from UC Berkeley in 1953, and a medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco. He had a surgical internship and residency in neurosurgery at the University of Minnesota, followed by a residency in ophthalmology at Stanford University. He was a founding member of the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco and the institute’s senior scientist and co-director for over two decades.He married Ruth White, a teacher and homemaker, in 1956. She died in 2009. In addition to his daughter Alison, Dr. Scott is survived by his wife, Jacquelyn Lehmer; three other daughters, Jennifer, Heidi and Ann Scott; a son, Nathaniel; four stepdaughters, Suzanne, Mary, Sally and Phillis Lehmer; 20 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Dr. Scott was not the first scientist to have explored the therapeutic potential of Clostridium botulinum. “Sausage poison” is what Justinus Kerner, a German poet and doctor, called the pathogen in the 1820s; he had observed the paralytic effects of food poisoning in his town after a single giant sausage sickened 13 people, six of whom died. After injecting it in snails, locusts and rabbits, Dr. Kerner finally injected into himself, noted its inhibiting effect on the autonomic and motor nervous systems, and hypothesized its use as a medical treatment for certain neural conditions. (Decades later, a microbiologist named it Bacillus botulinum, after botulus, the Latin word for sausage.)In 2013, Dr. Scott founded the Strabismus Research Foundation in Mill Valley, Calif., where he developed the use of bipuvicaine, a local anesthetic. At his death he was also working on a treatment procedure involving the electrical stimulation of the eye muscles by means of a tiny implanted pacemaker-like device.Meanwhile, sales of Botox for medical and cosmetic treatments have continued to soar. For the first nine months of 2021, it generated global revenues of more than $3.3 billion, with cosmetic sales accounting for slightly less than half of that figure, according to the earnings report for that period from AbbVie, the company that acquired Allergan in 2020.But Dr. Scott never regretted selling the drug.“I had my house paid for, my kids were educated,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle. “And I had the satisfaction of seeing absolutely wonderful medical results. So I was satisfied.” He added, “I’m not terribly good at giving away and spending money anyway.”

After she and her husband attended a Masters and Johnson lecture in 1966, they joined the burgeoning field of sexology. She remained active well into the 21st century.Shirley Zussman, a sex therapist who was trained by William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, the researchers who demystified the mechanics of sex, and who continued seeing patients until she was 105, died on Dec. 4 at her home in Manhattan. She was 107.Her son, Mark Zussman, confirmed the death.In 1966, Dr. Zussman, a psychiatric social worker and psychotherapist, and her husband, Leon Zussman, a gynecologist and obstetrician, were invited to a lecture given by two sex researchers who were virtually unknown at the time: Dr. Masters, a gynecologist, and Ms. Johnson, a college dropout who had studied psychology.At their St. Louis clinic, the couple (Dr. Masters was at the time married to someone else) had begun helping people improve their sex lives, using what they’d learned in nearly a decade of clinical research studying the ways men and women had sex and what gave them pleasure. Their book “Human Sexual Response,” which popularized the treatment of sexual dysfunction and helped liberate its sufferers from the analyst’s couch, had just been published and was not yet the runaway best seller it would become. But the lecture they delivered, as Dr. Zussman told Time magazine in 2014, the year of her centennial, resonated for her and her husband.Dr. Masters and Ms. Johnson’s research found that women could be multi-orgasmic, but not always or often — or, in some cases, ever — through penetration. They were pro-masturbation and taught about it. It was a fraught cultural moment, as the buttoned-up 1950s gave way to what Dr. Zussman called the frantic hookups of the ’60s, and each period had in its own way had been a recipe for performance anxiety and distress.Despite the relaxing mores of the ’60s, Dr. Zussman recalled: “It was all not just glamorous and wonderful to be sexual. One had to almost learn how to be a good partner and to enjoy the pleasure, not only for yourself but for each other. And I thought, ‘We can do that! Why can’t we do that?’”The Zussmans trained at the Masters and Johnson Institute and by the mid-’70s were co-directors of the Human Sexuality Center at Long Island Jewish-Hillside Medical Center. Their patients were married couples, typically women who were not orgasmic and men who were impotent or ejaculating prematurely.They felt the underlying issues had to do with communication, as they gently detailed in their 1979 book, “Getting Together: A Guide to Sexual Enrichment for Couples.” With exercises both physical and psychological — the Zussmans encouraged their patients to plumb their upbringing for clues to their attitudes about sex and relationships, and to examine how work, family and societal pressures affected their intimacy — the book was wide-ranging in its scope. It was also compassionate.The book that Dr. Zussman and her husband, Leon, published in 1979 aimed to teach couples how to communicate better. “Shirley was a pioneer in sex therapy and an excellent role model,” said Ruth Westheimer, who was a program director at Planned Parenthood and was studying sexuality at Columbia University when she took a course in sex therapy taught by Dr. Zussman and her husband at their Long Island clinic. It was the first experience with the discipline for Dr. Westheimer, the buoyant Holocaust survivor and sexologist who later became a familiar face on television. “They were trailblazers, because she was a therapist and her husband was a gynecologist and that validated the work. It gave it the legitimacy that sex therapists like me needed. I wouldn’t be talking about orgasms if it wasn’t for Shirley.”Sexual pleasure, Dr. Zussman said in 2014, “is only one part of what men and women want for each other. They want intimacy. They want closeness. They want understanding. They want comfort. They want fun. And they want somebody who really cares about them beyond going to bed with them. And I think people are always seeking that in every generation.”Shirley Edith Dlugasch was born on July 23, 1914, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Her father, Louis Dlugasch, was a doctor, and her mother, Sara (Steiner) Dlugasch, was a surgical nurse.Shirley grew up in Brooklyn and attended Smith College, majoring in psychology and graduating in 1934. (Julia Child was classmate.) She earned a diploma at the New York School of Social Work-Columbia University (now the Columbia School of Social Work) in 1937, and a doctorate in education from Teachers College, at Columbia University in 1969.Her dissertation looked at husbands who were present in the delivery room, a radical act in the ’50s and ’60s. Dr. Zussman wanted to explore delivery customs in other cultures, and she reached out to the celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead, who was a member of Columbia’s faculty, to be on her thesis committee.In addition to her son, Dr. Zussman is survived by her daughter, Carol Sun; three grandchildren; two step-grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. Leon Zussman died in 1980.Shirley and Leon Zussman in an undated photo.They had a sex therapy practice together and were directors of a clinic in Long Island. via Zussman familyDr. Zussman was twice president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. She was a frequent guest on talk shows and for a decade and a half had a monthly column in Glamour magazine, “Sex and Health,” She attributed her long life to good genes: Her sister lived to 104, her brother to 96.In her practice of both sex therapy and psychotherapy, Dr. Zussman saw same-sex couples and single people as well as heterosexual couples. She said the most common problem among her patients in the 21st century was a lack of desire.“You have to look at your priorities,” she told Time magazine. “You have to decide what is important to make you feel good about yourself and your life. And to help make your partner feel good. To establish something that is gratifying, that fills a need that we all have to be close to somebody.”

She was part of a groundbreaking study that observed how very young children separated from their mothers. Late in life, she became a photographer’s muse.Anni Bergman, an Austrian-born psychoanalyst who worked with autistic children and contributed to a landmark study of early childhood development, died on Oct. 2 at home in Manhattan. She was 102.Her son Tobi confirmed the death.Dr. Bergman was a 40-year-old mother and music teacher when she was hired by Margaret Mahler, a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, to help with a study of mothers and babies at a therapeutic nursery in the West Village. (A friend had turned down the job — Dr. Mahler was known to be difficult — and Dr. Bergman, who was interested in the field, applied.)For more than a decade, starting in 1959, Dr. Bergman and others watched as the babies found their legs, as it were — or didn’t. They observed how many ventured out on their own, and the various ways their mothers supported, or inhibited, such explorations.“It’s that moving away and coming back that’s very important,” Dr. Bergman told an interviewer in 2012. “We learned that separation isn’t always difficult. It isn’t always the baby that is left. Sometimes it is the baby that is leaving.”The study was groundbreaking at the time. Freudian theory, which still dominated therapeutic practices, had long dictated that the proper setting for learning about what Dr. Bergman called the internal world was in the analyst’s office, and that in any case babies couldn’t tell us much about that world until they began to talk.“Pre-Oedipal development was seen as a prelude to the main Oedipal drama,” she wrote in 2000 in her introduction to a reissue of “The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation,” written with Dr. Mahler and Fred Pine, another noted psychoanalyst, and first published in 1975. The book detailed the group’s work, which came to be known as separation-individuation theory.The group’s other big idea was to use observation and not theory to organize such a study — observation without judgment, as Dr. Bergman liked to say. And Dr. Bergman turned out to be an extraordinary observer, able to interpret a baby’s behavior with uncanny skill.This made her especially adroit at understanding autistic children, which became her calling. In a separate study, she and her colleagues worked with mothers and their autistic or psychotic children. Tripartite treatment — working together with parents and their children — was a rare practice at the time.“We felt like explorers in an obscure realm of preverbal and presymbolic development,” Dr. Bergman wrote. “A spirit of excitement prevailed.”Dr. Bergman was also a muse to her fellow therapist Ann Steiner, who began taking photographs of Dr. Bergman when she was 96. Ann SteinerAnna Emilie Rink was born on Jan. 10, 1919, in Vienna. Her father, Ernst, owned a factory. Her mother, Marta (Haas) Rink, a homemaker, died of influenza when Anni was 10; two sisters also died from the disease. Her father died when she 17. The family was well off, and Anni was cared for by a household staff that included a chauffeur, a cook and a nanny.She left Vienna in 1939, traveling by ship from Italy to Los Angeles.“When she would tell of her escape from the Nazis,” her son Tobi said, “people would say how horrible and frightening it must have been to be torn from home and thrown as a young woman all alone into an unknown world. She always told people that on the contrary, she was leaving a sheltered and repressive world behind and embarking on a great adventure. She was going to America!”In Los Angeles, Anni found work as an au pair and assistant to Christine Olden, a psychoanalyst who, like Anni, was from Austria, and attended the University of California, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in music. (She would later earn a master’s degree at the Bank Street College of Education.) Among the group of European expatriates who made up Dr. Olden’s circle was Peter Bergman, a Polish-born activist, publisher and writer who had worked to help people escape the Nazis. Anni and Peter fell in love and married soon after moving to New York in 1943.Anni worked as a music teacher at a progressive school in the East Village and co-wrote a children’s primer on playing the recorder. Peter opened a publishing company, the Polyglot Press, in a four-story brick townhouse in Chelsea. When he bought the building, the family moved in.Dr. Bergman’s office was on the top floor, and she decorated it with zest and flair, with flower-patterned wallpaper, brightly colored textiles and shelves overflowing with books and other collections.With its riot of colors and objects, being in her office “was like stepping into a magical world,” said Sebastian Zimmerman, a psychiatrist and photographer who included Dr. Bergman in “Fifty Shrinks,” his 2014 book of portraiture showing therapists in, as he put it, their natural habitats. Dr. Bergman explained that she had designed her office to be “a secluded world where the children have the complete freedom to express themselves and explore.”In 1978, Dr. Bergman co-founded a therapeutic nursery for autistic and psychotic children at the City College of New York. She earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the City University in 1983. She was a faculty member and supervisor there and at New York University and the Contemporary Freudian Society. In the late 1990s, with Rita Reiswig, a psychoanalyst who also focused on mothers and babies, she founded a program for parent-infant studies that in 2006 was renamed the Anni Bergman Parent-Infant Training Program.“Anni could put into words the experience of a child in a way that was extraordinary,” said Sally Moskowitz, the program’s co-director. “She could reach any child and make a connection.”Dr. Bergman was among a group of therapists directed by Beatrice Beebe, a researcher of mother-infant communication and a clinical professor of psychology at Columbia University Medical Center, who worked with pregnant mothers widowed by the Sept. 11 terror attacks. In 2005, she also began collaborating with Miriam Steele, director of the Center for Attachment Research at the New School, and Inga Blom, then a graduate student, on a follow-up study of the children who had been part of Dr. Mahler’s study and were then in their mid-40s.“You could see the aspects they carried forward,” Dr. Steele said, noting that some of the anxious babies had developed into grown-ups “avoidant in attachment context,” while others, thanks to Dr. Bergman’s early interventions, were secure adults.Colleagues described Dr. Bergman as fearless and said they were awed by her athleticism, which was unchecked by her advanced age. Until she was 92, she rode a bicycle through the chaotic Manhattan streets. She swam weekly until she was 97.Late in life, she became a muse to another photographer-therapist, Ann Steiner, who began taking photographs of Dr. Bergman in 2014, when she was 96, and continued until she was past her centennial. For years, Dr. Steiner photographed Dr. Bergman in her Chelsea townhouse and throughout the city, capturing her in a series of animated portraits.In addition to her son Tobi, Dr. Bergman is survived by another son, Kostia; a stepdaughter, Vera Buettner; five grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren, and six great-great-grandchildren. Mr. Bergman died in 1995.One of Dr. Bergman’s innovations in the treatment of autistic children was to add a helper to the mix: a therapeutic companion, as she described it, who could help the child navigate his or her world. One oft-told example of how this relationship worked was that of a child who wanted to take down all the items from the shelves of a grocery store.Dr. Bergman persuaded the shop’s manager to allow the behavior, explaining that the companion would put everything back. She knew that behind the child’s impulse was a need to establish her own sort of order on the world.

She was passionate — and relentless — about making the city she loved navigable for everyone.Edith Prentiss, a fierce and fiery advocate for the disabled who fought to make the city she loved more navigable for everyone, died on March 16 at her home in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. She was 69.The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, her brother Andrew Prentiss said.In 2004, the city’s taxi fleet had only three wheelchair-accessible cabs — minivans with ramps — and people like Ms. Prentiss had a less than one in 4,000 chance of hailing one. “They’re like unicorns,” she told The New York Times that year. “You have to be pure to catch one.”The number of accessible vehicles would eventually inch up to 231, but it took nearly a decade and a class-action lawsuit — of which Ms. Prentiss was a plaintiff — before the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission agreed to make the fleet 50 percent accessible by 2020. (That deadline was pushed back amid the pandemic and other issues; the fleet is now at 30 percent.)Ms. Prentiss also fought for accessibility on subways and in police stations, restaurants and public parks. And she fought for issues that didn’t affect her directly, like those that might impede people with mental, visual, auditory or other disabilities.When the city held a hearing in 2018 on banning plastic straws, a cause that is a darling of environmentalists but not those in the disability community, she made sure to gather a group and present an opinion. There are those who cannot hold a cup, the group wanted to point out, and straws are essential tools to their visiting a restaurant.At the meeting, group after group testified in favor of the ban. But Ms. Prentiss and her colleagues were not called on.“It’s hard to miss us — most of the people are in wheelchairs,” said Joseph G. Rappaport, executive director of the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled and the communications and strategy director of the Taxis for All Campaign, of which Ms. Prentiss was the chair, “but it went on and on and finally Edith had had it. She said, ‘Hey, we’re here to speak. We have an opinion about this bill.’” The group was allowed to speak.“She worked the inside, she worked the angles, and if she had to yell, that’s what she did,” Mr. Rappaport added. “And she did it well.”Ms. Prentiss in 2004. She pushed for accessibility on public transportation, and in police stations, restaurants and public parks.Frances Roberts for The New York TimesShe was bristly and relentless and always prepared. Woe to the city officials who had not kept their promise, or done their homework. She knew to an inch the proper length of a ramp, and how high a curb should be cut. She drove her motorized wheelchair as she spoke, with enormous confidence, and sometimes a bit of intentional recklessness; she was not above riding over the toes of those in her way.Among the many New York City officials to issue statements upon Ms. Prentiss’s death were Gale Brewer, the Manhattan borough president, and, in a joint statement, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Victor Calise, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities.In May, Ms. Prentiss will be inducted into the New York State Disability Rights Hall of Fame, and Mr. Calise will appear at the virtual ceremony in her place.“She was brilliant,” Ms. Brewer said in a phone interview. “She took no prisoners. She dispensed with the niceties, but her heart was so generous.”Edith Mary Prentiss was born on Feb. 1, 1952, in Central Islip, N.Y., on Long Island. She was one of six children (and the only daughter) of Robert Prentiss, an electrician, and Patricia (Greenwood) Prentiss, a social worker. Edith was asthmatic, and later diabetic. She began using a wheelchair once her asthma became severe when she was in her late 40s.After earning a degree in sociology from Stony Brook University on Long Island, she attended the College of Arts and Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.Early in her career, Ms. Prentiss was an outreach caseworker for ARC XVI Fort Washington, a senior services center. Working from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, she conducted blood pressure screenings and helped older people apply for city services and other benefits. She later worked with Holocaust survivors. Fern Hertzberg, the executive director of ARC, said Ms. Prentiss’s last job, before she retired in about 2006, was with a physical therapy center in her neighborhood.Ms. Prentiss was president of the 504 Democratic Club, which focuses on disability rights, and held positions with many other advocacy groups.She wasn’t known just for her bullying ways. Years ago, Susan Scheer, now chief executive of the Institute for Career Development, an employment and training group for the disabled, was a New York City government official, and she met Ms. Prentiss in the usual way: being yelled at in various hearings. Yet when Ms. Scheer, who has spina bifida, began using a wheelchair about a decade ago, she called Ms. Prentiss for help. She realized she had no idea how to navigate from her East Village apartment to her job at City Hall by bus.Ms. Prentiss in 2019 in a scene from the forthcoming documentary “Edith Prentiss: Hell on Wheels.” Arlene Schulman“Don’t worry,” she recalled Ms. Prentiss saying. “I’m on my way.” (It did take a while, with the usual impediments, like broken subway elevators.)Once there, Ms. Prentiss led Ms. Scheer out of her building and through the snarls of traffic on 14th Street, blocking the vehicles that menaced them, as she coached Ms. Scheer through her first bus launch, which was rocky. As she ping-ponged down the aisle, she ran over the driver’s toes. “Not your problem,” Ms. Prentiss called out behind her.Ms. Prentiss then directed the less-than-enthusiastic driver to secure Ms. Scheer’s chair (drivers are not always diligent about this step). And as the passengers groaned and rolled their eyes, Ms. Scheer said, Ms. Prentiss stared them down and announced: “We are learning here, folks. Let’s be patient.”In her extensive travels, her brother Andrew said, Ms. Prentiss had many traffic accidents and was hit by numerous vehicles, including taxis, a city bus and a FedEx truck. She was often in the emergency room, but if there was a community board meeting or a city hearing, she made sure to phone in from the hospital.In addition to her brother Andrew, Ms. Prentiss is survived by her other brothers, Michael, Robert Anthony, William John and David Neil.In early January, Ms. Prentiss received her first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine at the Fort Washington Armory. Needless to say, she had some complaints, as she told Ms. Hertzberg: The pencils to fill out the health questionnaire were the kind known as golf pencils, and too small for people with certain manual disabilities. The typeface on the questionnaire wasn’t big enough. And the chairs set out in the post-vaccination waiting area had no arms, which many people need as an aid to stand up with. She called the hospital that was administering the program there — and, Ms. Hertzberg said, you can be sure that it didn’t take long for the problems to be fixed.For the last three years, Arlene Schulman, a photographer, writer and filmmaker, has been working on a documentary called “Edith Prentiss: Hell on Wheels,” a title its subject initially quibbled with. She didn’t think it was strong enough.