The clinic taught patients and family members, for example, how to care for illnesses at home and pregnant women how to improve nutrition. In one of their first articles, written with collaborators and appearing in the scientific journal The Lancet, they demonstrated that melding medical care and social support made people healthier. Susser.Įarly in their careers, the couple ran a clinic in the South African township of Alexandra, near Johannesburg, with another husband-and-wife medical team. Stein is listed as the author or co-author of 270 academic articles and several books, including “Eras in Epidemiology: The Evolution of Ideas” (2009), which she wrote with Dr. Mervyn Susser, worked as a team and conducted hundreds of studies, many of which shaped the field of epidemiology and community health care. She was also well known for her research on child development and on mental illness. Stein’s research focused closely on women’s health at a time when the bulk of scientific study spotlighted men. Those backdrops shaped her approach to epidemiology: She aimed to identify the social, economic and political conditions that can affect the health of a population as well as individuals, an approach known as social medicine or community-based medicine.ĭr. Stein came of age in South Africa during World War II and started her career in the early years of institutionalized apartheid. Her daughter Ida Susser confirmed her death.ĭr. Zena Stein, a South African-born epidemiologist whose influential work encompassed the effects of famine on children, the health of entire communities afflicted by poverty and the impact of the AIDS crisis on women in Africa, died on Nov.