A copywriter, he and a partner in 1972 came up with “Try it, you’ll like it” and “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing.” Soon, sales were, well, fizzing.Howie Cohen, an advertising copywriter, often said he was congenitally familiar with indigestion. So perhaps it was only natural that in the 1970s, he, along with an ad agency colleague, would conjure up a catchy slogan that would not only sell more Alka-Seltzer but also become an American pop culture punchline: “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”That bedside lament, spoken by the comedian and dialectician Milt Moss — he actually said that thing on camera — vaulted from a 30-second TV commercial to sweatshirts, supermarket windows and even church marquees.It proved even more popular than “Try it, you’ll like it,” the first catchphrase for Alka-Seltzer that Mr. Cohen coined with his business partner, Bob Pasqualina, an art director at the Manhattan agency Wells Rich Greene.Mr. Cohen, who helped popularize products and companies like Petco (“Where the pets go”) and the fast-food chain Jack in the Box (exploding its clown mascot in a TV commercial in announcing a new, more sophisticated menu), died on March 2 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81.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.

He also identified the virus, which can cause infants to be born with severe physical and mental impairments as well as causing miscarriages and stillbirths.Dr. Paul D. Parkman, whose research was instrumental in identifying the virus that causes rubella and developing a vaccine that has prevented an epidemic of the disease in the United States for more than 50 years, died on May 7 at his home in Auburn, N.Y., about 60 miles east of Rochester in the Finger Lakes region. He was 91.The cause was lymphoblastic leukemia, his niece Theresa M. Leonardi said.Rubella, also known as German measles because German scientists classified it in the 19th century, is a moderate illness for most patients, identified by a spotty and often itchy red rash. But in pregnancies, it can cause infants to be born with severe physical and mental impairments and can also cause miscarriages and stillbirths.When Dr. Parkman was a pediatric medical resident in the 1950s at the State University Health Science Center (now the SUNY Upstate Medical University) in Syracuse, he once recalled, he anguished over a showing a new mother her stillborn baby whose rash, he would learn later, probably resulted from the mother’s infection with rubella during pregnancy.In 1964 and 1965, rubella — an epidemic that struck every six to nine years — caused about 11,000 pregnancies to be miscarried, 2,100 newborns to die and 20,000 infants to be born with birth defects.After the discovery of a vaccine for rubella, also known as German measles, displays educated the public about vaccination and the potential transmission of the virus from mother to fetus.Smith Collection/Gado, via Getty ImagesThat was the worst outbreak in three decades — and the last epidemic in the United States. The disease was declared eliminated in the Americas in 2015, although the virus has not yet been eradicated in Africa or Southeast Asia.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.

After he made a fortune selling prescription drugs and providing medical information online, he and his wife became leading breeders of thoroughbred horses.Martin J. Wygod, a Wall Street whiz who graduated from walking horses after races to owning and breeding championship thoroughbreds when he made millions from investing in online companies that sold pharmaceuticals by mail and pruned medical paperwork, died on April 12 in San Diego. He was 84.His daughter, Emily Bushnell, said he died in a hospital from complications of lung disease.Raised near two racetracks in suburban New York and mentored by a software pioneer, an investor and a gambler, Mr. Wygod was said to have been the youngest managing partner of a New York Stock Exchange brokerage in the 1960s. He became a millionaire before he was 30, and in 1993 he sold Medco Containment Services to Merck for $6 billion after building it into the nation’s largest mail-order prescription drug company and benefit manager in less than a decade. The sale netted Mr. Wygod $250 million.“The name of the game in the future is going to be information,” Jan Buck, chairman of Princeton Group International, a pharmaceutical industry consulting firm, commented on the sale to The New York Times in 1994. “Marty Wygod made $6 billion for himself because he developed a data base.”Mr. Wygod, who at the time was the chairman WebMD, outside his office in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., in 2007. Ten years later he would sell the company for a reported $2.8 billion.Sandy Huffaker for The New York TimesMr. Wygod then became the chairman of WebMD, a leader in online health information services, which he sold in 2017 for a reported $2.8 billion.He married Pamela Yellin in 1980, and in 1995 they moved from New Jersey to River Edge Farm, a 110-acre spread in Buellton, Calif., where they raised fillies and colts to become top racehorses.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 helped introduce free breakfasts and lunches for schoolchildren and open pantries and soup kitchens for the poor.Kathy Goldman, who devoted her career as a civic leader to establishing food banks, pantries and free breakfast and lunch programs in public schools to sustain low-income New Yorkers, died on March 5 in Brooklyn. She was 92.The cause of death, in a hospital, was congestive heart failure, her daughter, Julie Goldman, said.Ms. Goldman was determined to confront the collective indifference that she felt had contributed to the Holocaust. Over five decades she worked with many collaborators to successfully lobby for federal subsidies like food stamps and nutrition assistance for women, children and infants; create partnerships between corporate providers of provisions and local communities; and expand the mandate of anti-hunger programs to include help with housing, health care, education and other needs.In 1980, she founded the Community Food Resource Center, a food pantry, as a buffer against stricter eligibility requirements for welfare. Three years later she helped organize what is now the Food Bank for New York City, which served scores of soup kitchens and food pantries around the city from the Hunts Point market in the Bronx. She was the center’s executive director until she retired in 2003.A Food Bank of New York City truck delivers food to the Community Kitchen of West Harlem in 2009.Neilson Barnard/Getty ImagesIn 1984 she started the Community Kitchen of West Harlem, an innovative program that not only offered food, but also helped the hungry with other needs, including housing and health care. After renovations to the dining area, “when a 10-year-old boy exclaimed, ‘It’s just like McDonald’s!’ Goldman ‘considered it the greatest compliment of all time coming from a kid,’” Lana Dee Povitz wrote in “Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice” (2019).In the early 1990s, she persuaded the city to open school cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem in the evenings to serve dinners to older adults.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.

One of the first quadriplegic Harvard graduates, she became an author, professor and powerful voice for disabled people.Brooke Ellison, who after being paralyzed from the neck down by a childhood car accident went on to graduate from Harvard and became a professor and devoted disability rights advocate, died on Sunday in Stony Brook, N.Y. She was 45.Her death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of quadriplegia, her mother, Jean Ellison, said.As an 11-year-old, Brooke had been taking karate, soccer, cello and dance lessons and singing in a church choir. But on Sept. 4, 1990, she was struck by a car while running across a road near her Long Island home in Rockville Centre, in Suffolk County. Her skull, spine and almost every major bone in her body were fractured.After waking from a 36-hour coma, she spent six weeks in the hospital and eight months in a rehabilitation center. And for the rest of her life she was dependent on a wheelchair operated by a tongue-touch keypad, a respirator that delivered 13 breaths a minute and ultimately a voice-activated computer to write.“If she even survived,” her mother said in a phone interview, “at first we thought she would have no cognition at all.”But Brooke recovered better than expected. Her first words after waking in the hospital were “When can I get back to school?” and “Will I be left back?”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.

He won two Pulitzer Prizes by transforming accounts of doctors at work into in-depth, narrative articles that read like dramatic short stories.Jon Franklin, an apostle of narrative short-story style journalism whose own work won the first Pulitzer Prizes awarded for feature writing and explanatory journalism, died on Sunday in Annapolis, Md. He was 82.His death, at a hospice, came less than two weeks after falling at his home, his wife, Lynn Franklin, said. He had also been treated for esophageal cancer for two years.An author, teacher, reporter and editor, Mr. Franklin championed the nonfiction style that was celebrated as New Journalism but that was actually vintage narrative storytelling, an approach that he insisted still adhere to the old-journalism standards of accuracy and objectivity.He imparted his thinking about the subject in “Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction” (1986), which became a go-to how-to guide for literary-minded journalists.In 1979, Mr. Franklin won the first Pulitzer ever given for feature writing for his two-part series in The Baltimore Evening Sun titled “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster.”His vivid eyewitness account transported readers into an operating room where a surgeon’s agonizing struggle to save the life of a woman whose brain was being squeezed by a rogue tangle of blood vessels illuminated the marvels and margins of modern medicine.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? 

She trained caregivers to “validate” the delusions of older people with dementia, rather than try to wrest them into the real world.Naomi Feil was only 8 years old when she moved into what was then known as a home for the aged, where her parents worked. Living there until she left for college, she learned firsthand, by trial and error, how to comfort and communicate with older adults.When she died at 91 on Dec. 24 at her home in Jasper, Ore., she had devoted her entire career to finding ways to comfort disoriented older people and their caregivers.Her daughter Vicki de Klerk-Rubin said she died of cancer.Mrs. Feil was a 24-year-old social worker, convening a group of patients diagnosed as “senile psychotic,” when a staff psychologist at the Montefiore Home for the Aged in Cleveland laid the foundation for what would become the method she called validation therapy.“He taught us when feelings are ‘validated’ they are relieved,” Mrs. Feil explained on the website of her nonprofit Validation Training Institute in Pleasant Hill, Ore. “‘You are validating your residents, helping them release their pain.’ When social work students asked me what I was doing, I answered: ‘Validation.’ And so a new way of relating was formed.”Her method calls for caregivers to empathize with disoriented individuals in an effort to reduce their stress and support their dignity, rather than try to impose reality on them.“If you validate someone, you accept them where they are and where they’re not,” Mrs. Feil (pronounced “feel”) often said. “If you accept them, then they can accept themselves.”As she refined her methods, she founded the nonprofit Validation Training Institute in 1982. She directed it until 2014 when she was succeeded by Ms. de Klerk-Rubin, her daughter.“She was a pioneer in this area of person-centered dementia care,” Sam Fazio, the senior director of quality care and psychosocial research at the Alzheimer’s Association, said in a phone interview. “What’s key in connecting with a person with cognitive impairment is to meet them in their reality instead of expecting them to meet us in ours.”Her theory, like a related one called therapeutic deception, was not without its critics. The main objection is that it condones lying. The British Alzheimer’s Society has said that “we struggle to see how systematically deceiving someone with dementia can be part of an authentic trusting relationship.” Others argue that lying, or accepting a patient’s delusion as reality, is justified when it is in the patient’s best interest.There is still no consensus.According to the Validation Training Institute, more than 9,000 people in 14 countries have been trained to communicate with people with declining cognitive abilities, especially dementia, by expressing empathy.Mrs. Feil wrote two books: “Validation: The Feil Method, How to Help the Disoriented Old-Old” (1982) and “The Validation Breakthrough” (1993). She collaborated on a later edition of “The Validation Breakthrough” with Ms. de Klerk-Rubin.She and her husband, Edward R. Feil, a professional filmmaker, collaborated on a number of documentaries, including “The Inner World of Aphasia” (1968), which was placed on the United States National Film Preservation Board’s film registry in 2015.Ms. Feil wrote her second book, “The Validation Breakthrough,” in 1993. She later revised it in collaboration with her daughter Vicki de Klerk-Rubin.Gisela Noemi Weil was born on July 22, 1932, in Munich to Jewish parents. By the time she was 5, her family had fled Nazi Germany for the United States, where her father, Julius Weil, became director of the Montefiore Home for the Aged in Cleveland, and her mother, Helen (Kahn) Weil, ran the home’s social service department.After studying at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland, and earning her master’s degree from the Columbia University School of Social Work in New York in 1956, she married Warren J. Rubin. Their marriage ended in divorce. She then moved to Cleveland and returned to the Montefiore Home, this time as a member of the professional staff. She married Mr. Feil in 1963; he died in 2021.In addition to Ms. de Klerk-Rubin, her daughter from her first marriage, Mrs. Feil is survived by another daughter from that marriage, Beth Rubin; two sons from her second marriage, Edward G. Feil and Kenneth Jonathan Feil; six grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.She and Mr. Feil moved from Ohio to Eugene, Ore., in 2015 to live on their son Edward’s farm, where Mr. Feil, who was suffering from cognitive decline, received full-time home nursing care, piano lessons, painting classes and validation therapy.In the early 1960s, when she started working with disoriented people over 80, Mrs. Feil realized that helping them to face reality was an unrealistic goal, one that would frustrate the caregiver and the invalid alike.“Each person was trapped in a world of their own fantasy,” she wrote in her first book.“I learned validation from the people with whom I worked,” she added. “I learned that they have the wisdom to survive by returning to the past.”

After the death of his son, a police detective, was linked to toxins at the World Trade Center site, he helped win federal benefits for other emergency responders.Joseph C. Zadroga, whose lobbying helped deliver health benefits to thousands of emergency workers whose health was impaired by inhaling dust and debris at ground zero after the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center — although his efforts came too late for his own son, a New York City detective — died on Saturday after being hit by a car in Pomona, N.J. He was 76.His death was confirmed by his son Joseph F. Zadroga.Early Saturday afternoon, the elder Mr. Zadroga was visiting his wife at the Bacharach Institute for Rehabilitation. According to the Galloway Township police, he was standing outside his parked car when he was struck by an SUV that apparently accelerated accidentally and pinned him under it. He was pronounced dead at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center.A retired North Arlington, N.J., police chief, Mr. Zadroga was instrumental in the passage by Congress in 2010 of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which provides federal medical benefits, including monitoring and treatment, to police officers, firefighters and emergency medical workers who became ill as a result of their exposure to the contaminants in the aftermath of the 2001 devastation in Lower Manhattan. Mr. Zadroga and others successfully pushed Congress to reauthorize the legislation in 2015.The death of his son James was the first death of a public employee that was officially linked by an autopsy to time spent by an emergency worker at ground zero.James Zadroga, Mr. Zadroga’s son, with his daughter, Tyler Ann. She was orphaned after he died in 2006, and the elder Mr. Zadroga, along with other members of the family, raised her.FAMILY PHOTO VIA NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, via Associated PressJames Zadroga died in 2006, at 34, after spending some 500 hours engaged in recovery efforts at what became known as the Pile. By the following May, after sifting the rubble for human remains, workers had removed 1.8 million tons of tangled wreckage. He eventually qualified for disability pension benefits.His death came a year after his wife, Rhonda, died of a heart attack, which left him to raise their 4-year-old daughter, Tyler Ann. She was orphaned when he died bringing her a baby bottle, and she was brought up by his parents, his brother and his sister-in-law.“I just want everybody out there, the victims who got sick, to have the health care that they deserve, because Jimmy didn’t get it,” Joseph Zadroga said at a rally in 2014.Patrick Hendry, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, New York City’s largest police officers’ union, said in a statement: “Joseph Zadroga took on a fight that no father should have to face. But he fought for his hero son with incredible courage and helped every single 9/11 responder in the process.”After his son died, Mr. Zadroga was invited by Representative Carolyn Maloney, a Manhattan Democrat, to testify before Congress, and he helped mount a nationwide campaign for the health care legislation that was supported by the comedian and talk show host Jon Stewart and other celebrities.In his testimony, Ms. Zadroga quoted from a letter written by his son: “Everyone praises the dead as heroes, as they should, but there are more living suffering than dead.”The Ocean County coroner had originally found that James Zadroga died of “respiratory failure” resulting from a “history of exposure to toxic fumes and dusts.”But about a year and a half later, New York City’s chief medical examiner, Charles S. Hirsch, concluded that the particles in his lungs were from the abuse of prescription drugs. (His family said that if he had taken painkillers, it was because he found it increasingly painful to breathe.) A third opinion, by Dr. Michael Baden, who had been the city’s chief medical examiner in the late 1970s, supported the coroner’s original finding.The conflicting opinions entangled Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who endorsed Dr. Hirsch’s conclusion and said: “We wanted to have a hero, and there are plenty of heroes. It’s just in this case, science says this was not a hero.” The mayor later apologized, saying, “I believe that James Zadroga was a hero for the way he lived, regardless of the way that he died.”James Zadroga is not listed on the 9/11 memorial.Mr. Zadroga with the comedian and talk show host Jon Stewart in Washington in 2019. Mr. Stewart was among the celebrities who supported Mr. Zadroga’s campaign for what became the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJoseph Charles Zadroga was born on April 2, 1947, in Newark. His father, Charles, worked for RCA. His mother, Ann (Czyc) Zadroga, ran the household.After graduating from North Arlington High School, Joseph earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from William Paterson College (now William Paterson University) in Wayne, N.J., and a master’s in emergency management from Fairleigh Dickinson University. He served in the Army in Vietnam from 1966 to 1968.In addition to his wife, Linda (Baczewski) Zadroga, and his son, Mr. Zadroga is survived by his sister, Paula Bates, and two grandchildren.Joseph Zadroga worked for the North Arlington Police Department from 1970 until 1997, when he retired as chief. He later taught at the Bergen County Police Academy. Tattooed on his forearm were a crucifix, his son’s name and the words “Not Forgotten.”“Joe turned his son’s tragedy into something that really helped so many people,” Michael Barasch, who was James Zadroga’s lawyer, told northjersey.com, adding that James “didn’t die in vain, because of the autopsy his parents ordered.”“Without that,” he said, “we would have never had the evidence to get Congress to act.”

Dr. Christmas overcame race and gender barriers to run New York’s mental health agency under three mayors in the 1970s.June Jackson Christmas, a psychiatrist who broke barriers as a Black woman by heading New York City’s Department of Mental Health and Retardation Services under three mayors, died on Sunday in the Bronx. She was 99.Her daughter, Rachel Christmas Derrick, said she died in a hospital of heart failure.As a city commissioner, as chief of rehabilitation services at Harlem Hospital Center, and in her role overseeing the transition of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare to a Democratic administration for President-elect Jimmy Carter, Dr. Christmas ardently advanced her professional agenda.Her priorities included improving mental health services for older people, helping people cope with alcoholism, and assisting children ensnared in the bureaucracies of foster care and the legal system. She also sought to ease the transition of patients from being warehoused in state mental hospitals to living independently.Dr. Christmas publicly championed civil rights from an early age. She staged a sit-down strike at a segregated roller skating rink in Cambridge, Mass., when she was 14, and she later broke ground as a Black woman in education, employment and housing.June Antoinette Jackson was born on June 7, 1924, in Boston. Her mother, Lillian Annie (Riley) Jackson, was a homemaker who had worked at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston during World War II and as a state tax assessor. Her father, Mortimer Jackson, was a postal worker who fought for the advancement of Black workers in the union and civil service hierarchy.At school, June and other Black students were never asked to identify their ancestry on “I Am an American Day” — a snub she never questioned, she said in an interview conducted in 2016 for StoryCorps by her son Vincent, because “I think it was the reality of how we just accepted racism.”Her father, she recalled in the same interview, “would always get the highest score, often perfect, and never be offered the position.”One year, she said, she and a classmate who was also Black sold more Girl Scout cookies than anyone else in their troop, but the minister’s wife who headed the troop informed her that she would not be able to claim her prize in another town because “those camps, they’ve really never taken any Negroes.”Her father’s advice? “Be twice as good as everybody else,” she recalled.But, she added, “It seems to me that I’ve often been in places where if you wanted to make life better for yourself, you had to work to make life better for everybody.”When Dr. Christmas earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology in 1945, she was one of the first three women who identified as Black to graduate from Vassar College.via VassarShe earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology in 1945 from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where she was one of the first three women who identified as Black to graduate. She went on to receive a medical degree in psychiatry from the Boston University School of Medicine in 1949.She did her internship at Queens General Hospital and her residency at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. She received a certificate in psychoanalysis from the William Alanson White Institute, also in Manhattan.In 1953, she married Walter Christmas, a founder of the Harlem Writers Guild, who handed publicity for a number of firms and organizations and at one point was public relations director for the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York. He died in 2002.In addition to their daughter, a travel writer, she is survived by their son Gordon, a photographer, and four grandchildren. Their son Vincent, who worked for the city mental health agency his mother once headed, died in 2021.Dr. Christmas initially practiced privately, then worked as a psychiatrist for the Riverdale Children’s Association in New York from 1953 to 1965.In 1964 she founded Harlem Rehabilitation Center, a Harlem Hospital program, which gained a national reputation for providing vocational training and psychiatric help to psychiatric hospital patients who had returned to their communities after being discharged. From 1964 to 1972, she was also the principal investigator on research projects for the National Institute of Mental Health.In 1972, after serving briefly as a deputy commissioner, Dr. Christmas was appointed commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and Retardation Services by Mayor John V. Lindsay. She was reappointed in 1973 by Mayor Abraham D. Beame (she took a two-month leave to head Jimmy Carter’s 12-member transition team) and again in 1978 by Mayor Edward I. Koch.Dr. Christmas in 1973 with Mayor-elect Abraham D. Beame of New York, center, who reappointed her commissioner of the city’s mental health department, as did his successor, Edward I. Koch. With them were Elinor C. Guggenheimer, the incoming consumer affairs commissioner, and Michael J. Lazar, the incoming transportation administrator.Jack Manning/The New York TimesShe was a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, a professor of behavioral science at the City University of New York School of Medicine and resident professor of mental health policy at the Heller Graduate School of Social Welfare of Brandeis University in Massachusetts.In 1980, Dr. Christmas became the first Black woman president of the American Public Health Association. She was also a founder of the Urban Issues Group, a research institute, and served as its executive director from 1993 to 2000.Reflecting on her career in 2020, Dr. Christmas concluded that “the barrier of racism is greater than being a woman.”“I interviewed for a residency, and the man who was interviewing me said he was concerned that I, as an African American woman, would be too sexually stimulating to men patients,” she told The Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation.“When I was looking for an office in Manhattan in the 1960s, at least a third of the agents I spoke with on the telephone said they could guarantee me that there were no Blacks or Puerto Ricans in the building,” she added. “It was so hard to find a place to live that my husband and I wound up going to court, where we prevailed.”Having been exposed to racial discrimination since childhood, Dr. Christmas said, she was imbued with a commitment to minimize prejudice. She became a psychiatrist, she recalled, because she believed that “maybe if I went into psychiatric medicine I could teach people not to be racist.”Her strategy was individualistic, she said, invoking a proverb — “Each one, teach one” — rooted in American slavery when Black people were denied an education and literacy was conveyed from one person to another.

He attempted to define evil by plumbing the biographies and motivations of hundreds of violent felons who had committed heinous crimes.Dr. Michael H. Stone, a psychiatrist and scholar who sought to define evil and to differentiate its manifestations from the typical behavior of people who are mentally ill, died on Dec. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.The cause was complications of a stroke he had in January, his son David said.Dr. Stone was best known to the public as the author of the book “The Anatomy of Evil” (2009) and as the host from 2006 to 2008 of the television program “Most Evil,” for which he interviewed people imprisoned for murder to determine what motivated them to engage in an evil criminal act.He ranked the acts on a 22-category scale of his creation. Modeled on Dante’s nine circles of hell, his taxonomic scale ranged from justifiable homicide to murders committed by people whose primary motivation was to torture their victims.Only human beings are capable of evil, Dr. Stone wrote in “The Anatomy of Evil,” although evil is not a characteristic that people are born with. He acknowledged that while acts of evil were difficult to define, the word “evil” was derived from “over” or “beyond,” and could apply to “certain acts done by people who clearly intended to hurt or to kill others in an excruciatingly painful way.”For an act to be evil, he wrote, it must be “breathtakingly horrible” and premeditated, inflict “wildly excessive” suffering and “appear incomprehensible, bewildering, beyond the imagination of ordinary people in the community.”“Mike’s major contribution to psychiatry was sharpening the distinction between mental illness and evil,” Dr. Allen Frances. a former student of Dr. Stone’s who is now chairman emeritus of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C., said in a phone interview.“The problem,” Dr. Frances said, “is that with every mass murderer, every crazy politician, every serial killer, the first tendency in the public mind and the media is that he’s mentally ill.” Dr. Stone, he said, helped to change that default position.Dr. Stone became known for his book “The Anatomy of Evil” and for hosting the TV program “Most Evil.”Prometheus BooksAnalyzing the biographies of more than 600 violent criminals, Dr. Stone identified two predominant personality traits: narcissism, to the point of having little or no ability to care about their victims; and aggression, in terms of exerting power over another person to inflict humiliation, suffering and death.In “The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime” (2019), a sequel to Dr. Stone’s 2009 book, he and Dr. Gary Brucato warned that since the 1960s there had been an “undeniable intensification and diversification” of evil acts committed mostly by criminals who “are not ‘sick’ in the psychiatric and legal sense, as much as psychopathic and morally depraved.”The reasons, they wrote, included greater civilian access to military weaponry; the diminution of both individual and personal responsibility, as preached by fascist and communist governments earlier in the 20th century; sexual liberation, which unleashed other inhibitions; the ease of communication on cellphones and the internet; the rise of moral relativism; and a backlash against feminism.In 2000, Dr. Stone figured in a sensational murder trial that tested the limits of doctor-patient confidentiality. He wanted to testify in the murder trial of Robert Bierenbaum, a plastic surgeon and former patient of his who was accused of killing his wife, Gail Katz-Bierenbaum, in 1985.Dr. Stone had written a letter to his patient’s wife two years before her death, advising her to live apart from her husband for her own safety. He had asked that she sign and return it, but she never did. He had also contacted Dr. Bierenbaum’s parents, with his permission.The judge ultimately excluded Dr. Stone’s testimony from the trial on the basis of professional confidentiality. But the testimony of several other witnesses about the letter contributed to Dr. Bierenbaum’s conviction.Dr. Stone identified two predominant personality traits in those who commit evil acts: narcissism and aggression.Librado Romero/The New York TimesMichael Howard Stone was born on Oct. 27, 1933, in Syracuse, N.Y., the grandson of Eastern European immigrants. His father, Moses Howard Stone, owned a wholesale paper business. His mother, Corinne (Gittleman) Stone, was a homemaker.A prodigy who learned Latin and Greek as a child, he was only 10 years old when he began seventh grade. As the youngest and smallest student in the school, as well as the only Jewish one, he formed an alliance with a 17-year-old classmate who was a boxer, his son David said: Mike would do the classmate’s homework, and the classmate would protect him from local antisemitic bullies.He entered Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when he was 16, enrolling in a premedical curriculum but double-majoring in classics in case he was rejected by medical schools that had already met their quota of Jewish students. He enrolled in Cornell Medical School in Manhattan after graduating from Cornell in 1954 and received his medical degree in 1958.He originally studied hematology and cancer chemotherapy at Sloan Kettering Institute in Manhattan, but his mother’s chronic pain disorder prompted him to switch to neurology and then, eventually, to psychiatry. He did his residency at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he met Dr. Clarice Kestenbaum, whom he married in 1965.He is survived by two sons, David and John Stone, from that marriage, which ended in divorce in 1978; his wife, Beth Eichstaedt; his stepchildren, Wendy Turner and Thomas Penders; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson.Dr. Stone spoke 16 languages and, like a vestige from another era, customarily wore three-piece suits. He was known for his impish sense of humor: His latest book, “The Funny Bone,” published this year, is a collection of his cartoons, jokes and poems.An amateur carpenter, he built the shelves that housed his library of 11,000 books. His collection included about 60 books on Hitler — further evidence, like his memories of childhood bullying, of his yearning to define evil.As a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst and for many years a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Stone also conducted a long-term study of patients with borderline personality disorders, including those who had contemplated suicide. He concluded that, often as a result of therapy and other treatment, the condition of about two-thirds of them had improved appreciably some 25 years later.In “The New Evil,” Dr. Stone and Dr. Brucato offered a possible explanation for why “particularly heinous and spectacular crimes,” especially those committed in America and by men, had been on the rise since the 1960s. They warned against “the rise of a sort of ‘false compassion,’ in which the most relentless, psychopathic persons are sometimes viewed as ‘victims.’”The two concluded by invoking a familiar metaphor: A frog dropped in a pot of boiling water will immediately try to escape; but, if placed in cold water that is gradually heated, the frog will remain complacent until it’s too late.“It is our ardent hope that, after a period of terrible growing pains, our culture will eventually learn that true power and control come only after a lifelong process of mastering and inhibiting the self,” they wrote. “Perhaps, as a first step, we should admit that the water in our collective pot is growing disquietingly warmer, day by day.”