HELENA CRISTINA MOREIRA

USP public-health professor who brought paediatric care to the edges of São Paulo

Professor Helena Moreira kept a cat named Pasteur, a Palmeiras scarf in her desk drawer and, taped inside the door of her cabinet at the Faculdade de Saúde Pública, a child's crayon drawing of a stethoscope captioned “To Dona Lena, who listened.”

Born in Caruaru, Pernambuco, in 1946, the daughter of a market trader and a seamstress, Helena studied medicine at the Universidade de São Paulo, graduating in 1970 as one of eleven women in a class of one hundred and twenty. She trained in paediatrics at the Hospital das Clínicas, earned her doctorate in public health at USP in 1982, and joined the university's School of Public Health in 1976, where she taught for almost forty years.

Her research followed children: malnourished babies in the Northeast in the seventies, then the outskirts of São Paulo in the eighties and nineties, where she showed that a nurse on a bicycle and a mother with a growth chart could achieve more than any hospital ward. Her findings helped shape neighborhood clinics across the city. For decades she volunteered with the Pastoral da Criança, the Catholic child-health ministry, and trained thousands of volunteer mothers to weigh babies and recognize danger signs.

She was a wonderfully terrible cook who made feijoada every Saturday for friends, students and the occasional stray colleague, and a devoted Palmeiras supporter whose language in the stands would not have survived a textbook. She married Henrique Moreira, a civil engineer, in 1969, and together they raised two children in a house in Pinheiros with more books than shelves.

Professor Moreira died on 11 February 2022, aged seventy-five, in São Paulo after a short illness. She is survived by Henrique, her daughter Beatriz, her son Rafael, three grandchildren and her sister Josefa, and by thousands of mothers and children whose names she knew.

“A neighborhood clinic is only as good as the last mother who felt listened to.”