Eli Newberger

Eli Newberger (December 26, 1940 - October 24, 2024) was an American pediatrician, child-protection researcher, author, and jazz musician. He founded the Child Protection Team at Boston Children's Hospital and later directed the hospital's Family Development Program, work that helped shape multidisciplinary hospital responses to child abuse in the United States. He taught at Harvard Medical School and published widely on child maltreatment, family violence, and child welfare.

Newberger was also known for his role as a prosecution medical expert in the 1997 trial of British au pair Louise Woodward, and for later public commentary on the limits and risks of child-protection medicine. Outside medicine, he was a jazz tubist and pianist, a co-founder of the New Black Eagle Jazz Band, and later a performer with Eli and the Hot Six.

Early life and education Newberger was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 26, 1940, to Joseph Newberger and Helen Farber Newberger. He grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. His later work included studies and reviews on hospital decision-making, child physical abuse, family violence, and pediatric social illness.

In 1983, Newberger, Carolyn Moore Newberger, and Robert L. Hampton published "Child Abuse: The Current Theory Base and Future Research Needs" in the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry. He also wrote for general readers, most notably The Men They Will Become: The Nature and Nurture of Male Character, published in 1999.

Expert testimony and public advocacy Newberger was a prosecution witness in the 1997 trial of Louise Woodward, a British au pair accused in the death of nine-month-old Matthew Eappen. At the time, Newberger was medical director of the child-abuse unit at Boston Children's Hospital and had examined the child. He testified that, in his opinion, the injuries were consistent with violent shaking and head trauma. Woodward was convicted of second-degree murder, but the trial judge later reduced the conviction to involuntary manslaughter and sentenced her to time served.

Newberger also criticized what he saw as overreach in some child-protection investigations. In a 2013 Boston Globe story about medical child-abuse allegations, he warned that physicians in the specialty had "enormous and really unchecked power" and said that some state agencies were too deferential to hospitals in contested cases.

During the Catholic clergy sexual-abuse scandal in Boston, Newberger and Carolyn Moore Newberger were among specialists who said that Cardinal Bernard Law had rejected their 1993 advice to report abusive priests to law enforcement and keep them away from minors. Newberger had previously served on a 1971 gubernatorial commission that recommended mandatory reporting of child abuse in Massachusetts.

Personal life and death Newberger married Carolyn Moore on May 31, 1962.