As an older brother in a troubled home, Eli’s role quietly shifted from child to de facto guardian. “He was really a father figure to his two younger brothers,” she said. his wife, carolyn newbergerpsychologist, flutist 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 Lennox, 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 the death of Matthew Eappen of Newton. A judge later reduced Woodward’s sentence to involuntary manslaughter.

By then, Dr. Newberger was considered an expert in the field. By the time he was in his twenties, he was already well-respected for his ability to identify which young patients had been mistreated when 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 Male Character.”

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

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

While pioneering medical approaches to identifying and preventing child abuse, Dr. Newberger was also establishing himself internationally as an improvisational jazz tuba player.

He 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 also performed with many other musicians and in later years performed with his New Orleans-style ensemble, Eli & the Hot Six.

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

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

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

Jazz and his medical work were closely tied to Dr. Newberger, each helping to make the other possible.

“The joy and liberation of this musical life has allowed me to face the rigors of child abuse and family violence.” he told the Boston Globe in 2015.when his 75th birthday celebration included performing with Eli and the Hot Six at Scullers Jazz Club in Cambridge. “My medical life connects with 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 huge feeling of being a teenager and caring for his younger siblings,” his wife said.

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

His father, Joseph Newberger, was an accountant who divorced his mother, Helen Farber Newberger, whose care Dr. Newberger and his wife cared for for years.

While attending high school at Mount Vernon, Dr. Newberger also received lessons from William Bell, principal tuba player of the New York Philharmonic. Bell lent Eli a trumpet during a time when he was playing as a jazz pianist 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 parallel pre-medical courses.

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

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,” he said. “We grew up together.”

Carolyn taught underclassmen how to pay their way to Yale Medical School. After graduating, he joined the Peace Corps during the Vietnam War. At the time, she was pregnant with her daughter, Mary-Helen Nsangou, who now lives in Brookline.

Their Peace Corps service took them to Africa and Upper Volta, which is now Burkina Faso, where they discovered that pediatrics was their calling.

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

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

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

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

Dr. Newberger delighted audiences wherever he performed.

In a 1986 New York Times review Of 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 softly sings melodies over banjo accompaniment.”

Calling one cut from the album a “tour de force,” Wilson noted that Dr. Newberger performed Gershwin’s Prelude in C-Sharp Minor in “a duet with himself while playing the valves of the tuba with one hand and playing the piano.” with the other.”

During the years they lived 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, which 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 “strongly believed that music could have a positive impact on children in need,” Roylance said.

From personal experience, Dr. Newberger knew that music could help people survive hardships and challenges.

“I consider myself both a musician and a doctor. My life has been a constant balancing act, music sometimes serves as a counterbalance to medicine and other times the other way around.” Dr. Newberger wrote in “Tuba Medicine,” an essay posted on his website..

“Music keeps me in touch with the emotional foundations of life,” he added. “It allows me to worry.”

You can contact Bryan Marquard at [email protected].