Eva Salber devoted her life to working on behalf of the world’s poor and oppressed people. The ancient Jewish commandment “Be kind to the stranger” characterizes the ideals that Eva Salber pursued in her work as a physician, researcher, and writer.

Eva Salber was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on January 5, 1916, the second of three daughters of Lithuanian parents, Moses and Fannie (Srolowitz) Salber. From the University of Cape Town Medical School, she received an M.B.Ch.B. (the equivalent of an M.D.) in 1938, a diploma in public health in 1945, and a doctorate in medicine (M.D.) in 1955. She married physician Harry T. Phillips in 1939, and the couple had four children: David (b. 1943), a sociologist; Mark (b. 1946), a historian; Rosalie (b. 1950), a health care administrator; and Philip (b. 1954), an investment adviser. She taught at the Harvard School of Public Health (1957–1966) and at Duke University Medical School (1971–1982). Her honors included terms as a Radcliffe Scholar, Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study (1966–1967), as a Macy Fellow (1969–1970), and as Senior International Fellow of the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health (1980).

As a physician, she promoted the health of poor communities by empowering patients and populations. Many of those she assisted became leaders and organizers in their own communities. Her work in a housing project in Boston and with poor rural populations in North Carolina grew out of lessons learned in South Africa, where she and her husband were pioneers in establishing community health centers after World War II. In the United States, as in South Africa, she believed fervently that health and well-being stem from one’s total life circumstances, in which medical care plays an important but limited role. Because they opposed apartheid, Eva Salber and her family left South Africa in 1956.

In her scientific research, Eva Salber published close to a hundred articles in a wide variety of medical journals in Britain, South Africa, and the United States, primarily on epidemiological studies relating social factors and health, as well as related community health issues. Among her contributions were studies on infant growth in different races, socioeconomic patterns in breastfeeding, smoking behavior in schoolchildren, lactation and breast cancer, and social factors in the utilization of health services.

In a more literary genre, she used her intimate knowledge of several communities to produce two rich oral histories, Caring and Curing: Community Participation in Health Services, and Don’t Send Me Flowers When I’m Dead: Voices of Rural Elderly. All her work, both scientific and literary, is reviewed in her autobiography, The Mind Is Not the Heart: Recollections of a Woman Physician.

Eva Salber died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on November 18, 1990. Throughout her life, she displayed the generosity and drive for improvement of social conditions characteristic of her Jewish home and community.