Morton Birnbaum, who died Saturday at 79, was a crusading lawyer-physician who proposed and helped establish the right of mental patients in state facilities to receive therapy.

While on the face of it, the notion that patients should receive treatment appears to be common sense, it was in fact a necessary reform, as the mentally ill were — and sometimes still are — placed in state-run facilities without receiving therapy. Birnbaum fought such warehousing both by legislative means, especially in state and federal courts, and in lawsuits that often dragged on for years.

Birnbaum first postulated the right to treatment in a 1960 article in the American Bar Association Journal. He also coined the word “sanism” to describe discrimination against the mentally ill.

Among his achievements was influencing a 1964 federal law recognizing the right to treatment, the 1975 Supreme Court decision O’Connor v. Donaldson, limiting the right of the state to confine the mentally ill, and a 1984 decision in federal appeals court, establishing the right to treatment. Birnbaum brought the 1984 case on behalf of a pseudonymous client at Brooklyn’s Kingsboro Psychiatric Center, whom he dubbed with typical insouciance Walter Woe.

On all of his cases, Birnbaum worked pro bono, working nights and weekends, while supporting himself through his small gerontology practice in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I make my living as a doctor, and throw it away as a lawyer,” he was fond of saying.

Birnbaum was raised in Midwood and other parts of Brooklyn. His father was a chicken plucker, and later a factory worker. Birnbaum dropped out of high school before returning to Erasmus Hall evening high school, serving in the Navy, and eventually going to Columbia Law School. His first job after graduating in 1951 was handling financial transactions in Japan for his uncle, who exported sewing machines to the country. Family lore has it that Birnbaum was offered a piece of the Toyota company, but turned it down, thinking that small Japanese cars would never sell in America.

He returned after two years to New York, but found practicing law stultifying. In 1955, he sued the Good Humor Corporation for overcharging the public for orange juice and I-stix, described as a frozen fruit confection, in Coney Island. He said he was “representing the wishes of more than 8 million citizens.” The suit was dismissed in state Supreme Court without comment.

He soon found a more constructive outlet for his humanitarian impulses by attending medical school at New York Medical School,intending to work on catastrophic illnesses that lay waste to family finances. Mental illness became his area of legal expertise, but he worked at first as a general practitioner, and gradually shifted into gerontology, in part because his loyal clientele grew older.

A postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard in 1958 helped him hone the ideas that became “The Right to Treatment.” But its message seemed to fall upon deaf ears, as Birnbaum received an estimated 50 rejections from professional journals, including one that returned with a note saying, “This is preposterous.”

“I thought once it got published, the doors would break down and everyone would say, ‘What a wonderful idea, you discovered a new penicillin,'” he recently told the Catalyst, the newsletter of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a Washington mental health organization.”But nobody broke down the doors.”

He soon became involved in protracted litigation to release mental patients in separate cases, one of which culminated in the Supreme Court O’- Connor v. Donaldson decision, in 1975. More cases followed, and Birnbaum frequently found himself part of legal teams, some of which were intent on eliminating a state role in the treatment of mental illness altogether. As the issue matured, he came out forcefully in favor of treatment, but supported deinstitutionalization as a tool to force governments into increasing funding for mental illness.The idea was that once the public saw the results of not treating mental illness, there would be a groundswell of public opinion for increased funding.

In 1968, he found himself allied with segregationist governor and presidential candidate George Wallace, whom Birnbaum personally detested, in challenging federal rules that exclude Medicaid from paying for mental health treatment for people under 65. He would continue to bring suits against the so-called Medicaid exclusion throughout his career, giving up his final case only a few years ago as his health deteriorated.

In 1989, while mired in yet another case challenging the adequacy of care at Bronx Psychiatric Hospital, he told a reporter, “I tell my children that it takes a hero to run and a coward to fight. I can’t quit this because I’m a poor loser.”

Morton Birnbaum

Born October 20, 1926, in New York; died November 26 in Brooklyn of the effects of a stroke; survived by his wife, Judith; his children, Jeanette, Julius, Jacob, Belinda, Rebecca, and David, and three grandchildren.