Vincent Fontana, who died suddenly Tuesday at 81 while on vacation, was the long-serving medical director of New York Foundling Hospital and a pediatrician who helped make child abuse a national medical priority.

The author of “Save the Family, Save the Child” and “Somewhere a Child Is Crying,” Fontana established one of the first residential temporary shelters for abusive mothers and their children. In 1982, he founded a crisis nursery at New York Foundling, the first in New York State.

As director of the Mayor’s Task Force on Child Abuse under mayors Lindsay, Beame, and Koch, Fontana was a highly visible advocate for children who did not hesitate to publicly lacerate politicians if he thought it would further his cause.

“Because he was smart and witty, him confronting you could be a pretty uncomfortable situation,” the executive director of the Foundling, William Baccaglini, said.

Fontana was also an early advocate for child abuse hotlines. He even helped set up the first such hotline in Italy, while on tour with Governor Cuomo’s wife, Matilda.

“Everybody regarded Dr. Fontana as a seer, with an almost saintly devotion to the cause,” Mr. Cuomo said in an interview.

His devotion occasionally landed Fontana in unfamiliar circumstances, as once when he tried to convince Frank Sinatra to be a spokesman for his charitable National Alliance for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse. He had heard that Sinatra was interested in the cause, and one night in 1978, the two went to dinner along with Barbara and Tina, Sinatra’s wife and daughter. Fontana made his case to Sinatra over dinner at the 21 Club, and the party moved on to a disco, where Sinatra excused himself to talk to an acquaintance. Uncertain what to do, Fontana invited Barbara to dance. The evening ended cordially but noncommittally, and Fontana never heard from Sinatra again.

Fontana said he always suspected that asking Barbara to dance was the fatal error in his pitch, so he was gratified to learn after Sinatra died in 1998 that the singer had stipulated in his will that several million dollars go toward caring for maltreated children.

“As long as the money goes to help children who are abused and neglected, I’m satisfied,” Fontana told Newsday at the time. “They’re my mission in life.”

A 1947 graduate of the Long Island College of Medicine, Fontana specialized in pediatric allergy. He served as a doctor at the United States Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md., in the early 1950s, during which time he was personal physician to the secretary of the Navy, as well as to President Eisenhower during the latter’s visits to Camp David. He entered private practice in New York in 1954.

A devout Catholic, Fontana became Francis Cardinal Spellman’s physician. In 1962, Spellman appointed him medical director and pediatrician-in-chief at Foundling, a position he would hold until the end of his life.

In 1963, Fontana wrote a seminal paper on child abuse for the New England Journal of Medicine, “The Maltreatment Syndrome in Children,” which was among the first to identify violence and neglect of children as a public health challenge.

A decade later, Fontana’s devotion to the cause had if anything intensified. In 1973, he published “Somewhere a Child is Crying,” in which he made the case for federally funded national hotlines for reporting child abuse. He wrote, “I find it very strange that a society which professes to care for its children, can spend billions on research for cancer, heart problems, and on the Pentagon, while virtually ignoring the greatest crippler and killer of our children – child abuse and neglect.”

In a paragraph that gives some indication of his intensity, Fontana wrote, “Parents bash, lash, beat, flay, stomp, strangle, gut-punch, choke with rags or hot pepper, poison, crack heads open, slice, rip, steam, fry, boil and dismember. They use fists, belt buckles, straps, hairbrushes, lamp cords, sticks, baseball bats, rulers, shoes and boots, lead or iron pipes, bottles, bicycle chains, pokers, knives, scissors, chemicals, lighted cigarets, boiling water, steaming radiators, and open gas flames.”

He had seen it all in New York City, where he estimated that two children a week died of abuse – much of it preventable if city agencies would share information more efficiently. Fontana was highly vocal in several notorious child murder cases, including the Lisa Steinberg murder, in which he insisted that Lisa’s mother, Hedda Nussbaum, should have been charged as an accessory to the crime even though she herself was severely battered.

Challenges arose as the years went by: The crack epidemic, for example, was a contributing factor in child abuse. He became a vocal opponent of confidentiality laws that often prevented agencies from informing authorities about past abuse.

Fontana published 150 scientific articles as well as a textbook, “The Maltreated Child.” He made ward calls until the end of his life.

He lived simply and alone at Stony Brook, in a home he named Tranquility, overlooking Long Island Sound. “Just as a priest sacrifices all to go into the priesthood to do the work of God, I’ve taken on the same kind of thing to do God’s work for children,” he told Newsday in 2000.

He never married.

Vincent James Fontana

Born November 19, 1923, in Manhattan; died July 5 on Block Island; survived by his brother, Joseph Fontana, and sister, Lee Bobrow.