Obituary: Dr. Herbert Milton Perr, 94

Dr. Herbert M. Perr, a highly respected Long Island physician who practiced initially as an internist and then for nearly four decades as a psychiatrist in Rockville Centre, died peacefully with his family at his side on Nov. 7 after a long illness. He was 94.

Perr and his beloved wife of 68 years, Miriam (Mimi) Adler Perr, lived in Jefferson’s Ferry in South Setauket for the past 12 years following 54 years in Rockville Centre.

Perr was born in Newark, N.J. on Nov. 5, 1921. He earned a BA from New York University in 1941, and graduated from Tulane Medical School in 1945. He served in the Navy during World War II. In 1950, he opened a private practice in internal medicine. After stateside duty during the Korean War, he decided to specialize in psychiatry, completed his residency and board certification, and opened his private practice which spanned nearly four decades. He retired in 1995.

A graduate of the Karen Horney Institute, Perr was certified to practice psychoanalysis and taught at the American Institute for Psychoanalysis and the New School for Social Research. From 1969 into the 1980s, he served as Medical Director of South Nassau Communities Hospital’s Outpatient Mental Health Clinic, which he had been instrumental in establishing. He became Chief of the Department of Psychiatry in 1971. Devoted to teaching, Perr was a faculty member of the Department of Psychiatry at Stony Brook University Medical School from 1972 to 1980, and a member of the faculty of the Karen Horney Institute.

A humanist and lifelong peace activist, Perr had a strong sense of moral justice and an unwavering commitment to the individual. He founded a local chapter of the Society for Individual Responsibility and was active in Physicians for Social Responsibility. Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, in concert with Mimi, he marched to protest the Vietnam War and nuclear proliferation.