As the older brother in a troubled home, Eli’s role gradually shifted from child to de facto guardian. “He was truly the parental figure to his two younger siblings,” said his wife, Carolyn Newbergerpsychologist, flautist and artist.

Dr. Newberger, who founded the Child Protection Team and Family Development Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, died on October 24. He was 83 years old and lived in Lenox, having spent much of his life in Brookline.

In 1997, he was a key witness in the trial of British au pair Louise Woodward, who was initially convicted of second-degree murder in Newton’s death of Matthew Eappen. A judge later reduced Woodward’s conviction to manslaughter.

Dr. Newberger was then considered an expert in the field. By his late 20s, he was already well respected for his ability to identify young patients who had been abused when the children’s hospital asked him to create a child abuse unit.

The team of doctors, nurses and social workers he assembled in the early 1970s became an interdisciplinary inspiration for similar programs in hospitals across the country.

His numerous publications include the 1999 book “The Men They Will Become: The Nature and Nurture of Masculine Character.”

“Eli’s impact on children’s well-being is significant,” said Randal Rucker, former executive director of Family Service of Greater Boston.

“Eli has always emphasized the need to combine our expertise to benefit children who are harmed, to help prevent harm in the first place and, when horrible things happen, to support that child, to help them heal and work with him. families too,” Rucker said.

While pioneering medical approaches to identifying and preventing child abuse, Dr. Newberger also established himself on the international stage as an improvisational jazz tuba player.

He has performed locally, throughout Europe and recorded numerous albums, primarily with the New Black Eagle Jazz Band, which he co-founded in the early 1970s. Dr. Newberger has also performed with many other musicians and played years later with his New Orleans-style ensemble Eli & the Hot Six.

“He is very well known as a jazz tuba player,” said Mike Roylance, principal tuba of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who played with and admired Dr. Newberger.

As a jazz improviser, “he would quote little songs from musicals, from Beethoven or from a Shostakovich string quartet,” Roylance said.

“He had the ability to add intelligence to music,” Roylance said. “His tone was rich, velvety and warm. It was always beautiful and enveloping.

Jazz and his medical work were closely intertwined with Dr. Newberger, each helping to make the continuation of the other possible.

“The joy and liberation of this musical life allowed me to cope with the rigors of child abuse and domestic violence. » he told the Boston Globe in 2015during his 75th birthday celebration, he notably performed with Eli and the Hot Six at the Scullers Jazz Club in Cambridge. “My medical life is linked to the sense of shared struggle and social protest that is deeply rooted in the history and practice of jazz. »

Born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 26, 1940, Dr. Newberger grew up in Mount Vernon, New York.

The empathy and compassion he later showed toward abused children “started with this enormous feeling of being a teenager and caring for your younger siblings,” his wife said.

“He was a wonderful older brother in every sense of the word,” said Dr. Newberger’s younger brother, Henry of Coram, New York.

Their father, Joseph Newberger, was an accountant who divorced their mother, Helen Farber Newberger, whom Dr. Newberger and his wife cared for for years.

While attending Mount Vernon High School, Dr. Newberger also took lessons from William Bell, principal tuba player of the New York Philharmonic. Bell lent Eli a horn during the time he was gigging as a jazz pianist in order to save money for college.

Dr. Newberger also studied piano and organ at the Juilliard School, and majored in music theory and composition at Yale University, taking pre-medical courses at the same time.

On a blind date he met Carolyn Moore, student at Sarah Lawrence College. They married in 1962, a week before his graduation.

She became a child psychologist with a career at Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he taught in addition to his work at Children’s.

“We were really partners in our life together because we were 19 when we met,” she said. “We grew up together.”

Carolyn taught first-year students how to pay their tuition at Yale School of Medicine. After graduating, he joined the Peace Corps during the Vietnam War. At the time, she was pregnant with their daughter, Mary-Helen Nsangou, who now lives in Brookline.

His service in the Peace Corps took them to Africa and Upper Volta, which is now Burkina Faso, where he discovered that pediatrics was his calling.

Dr. Newberger was “a person of enormous curiosity and moral and intellectual interest,” Carolyn said.

When faced with a challenge or problem at work, at home, or with music, “Eli’s first response was always, ‘I’m going to solve this problem,’ and he did.”

In addition to his wife, daughter and brother, Dr. Newberger leaves two grandchildren.

A gathering to celebrate his life and work will be announced.

Dr. Newberger delighted audiences wherever he performed.

In a 1986 New York Times review Of the duets he had recorded with banjo player Jimmy Mazzy, John S. Wilson wrote that Dr. Newberger’s tuba playing was “often surprisingly light and lyrical as he gently sings melodies to the banjo accompaniment” .

Calling an album a “tour de force,” Wilson noted that Dr. Newberger performed Gershwin’s Prelude in C-sharp minor in “a duet with himself as he fingers the valves of the tuba with one hand and plays of the other’s piano.

During their years of living part-time in the Berkshires and then full-time in retirement, Dr. Newberger and his wife increasingly focused their attention on the Kids 4 Harmony program run by 18 Degrees agency, Family Services for Western Massachusetts, who honored the couple in July.

Kids 4 Harmony is inspired by El Sistema, a Venezuelan music education program that uses the motto “music for social change.”

Dr. Newberger “believed that music could have a positive impact on children in need,” Roylance said.

From his personal experience, Dr. Newberger knew that music could help people overcome difficulties and challenges.

“I consider myself as much a musician as a doctor. My life has been a constant balancing act, with music sometimes serving as a counterweight to medicine, and sometimes the other way around. » Dr. Newberger wrote in “The Medicine of the Tuba,” an essay published on his website..

“Music keeps me in touch with the emotional foundations of life,” he added. “It makes me care.”

Bryan Marquard can be contacted at [email protected].