A lasting legacy
In Memoriam WE F ONDLY R EM E M BE R T HOSE WHO HAVE G ONE BE FORE US
1922-2021
ZENA STEIN
Image: Paul Weinberg
1920s
[MBBCh 1950, DSc honoris causa 1993]
EMERITUS PROFESSOR ZENA STEIN WITH HER HUSBAND PROFESSOR MERVYN SUSSER
Their pioneering research drew attention to the relationships between health, disease and social injustice.
98 W I T S R E V I E W
Influential and beloved epidemiologist Emeritus Professor Zena Stein died on 7 November 2021 at her home in Coatesville in the United States at the age of 99. Much of her work was conducted with her husband Professor Mervyn Susser (MBBCh 1950, DSc honoris causa 1993), who died in 2014. Their pioneering research drew attention to the relationships between health, disease and social injustice. Professor Stein was born on 7 July 1922 in Durban, to a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. Her mother, Lily (Rolnick) Stein, was a homemaker. Her
father, Philip Stein, was a mathematics professor at Natal Technical College, which became the Durban University of Technology. She attended the University of Cape Town for her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history, receiving two Gold Medals for her work before embarking on her medical degree at Wits. She married Professor Susser in 1949 and it’s documented that the couple organised a protest over the treatment of black medical students, who were barred from observing autopsies of white cadavers at Wits. Immediately after their internships, they joined with another radical couple, Dr Michael Hathorn (BSc Eng 1943, MBBCh 1950) and Dr Margaret Cormack (BSc 1946, MBBCh 1949), to direct and staff the Alexandra Health Centre and University Clinic in Johannesburg. These medics were influenced by Witsie couple Dr Sidney Kark (MBBCh 1937, MMed 1954, DSc honoris causa 1982) and Dr Emily Kark née Jaspan (MBBCh 1938), who ran Pholela, the landmark health centre in the 1940s in rural KwaZulu-Natal. Dr Sidney Kark “was the one who explained to us how work as a doctor could in fact do something to society,” Professor Stein said in an interview in 2003 to the journal Epidemiology. “We had preventive medicine and curative medicine; he had a new word for us, ‘promotive’ medicine, which means you actually helped communities to make a difference to their health.” Their “Pholela model” led them to
