Dr. Jeffrey B. Greene, a colleague, called Dr. Laubenstein "the ultimate AIDS physician." Despite her handicap, she met patients in the emergency room in the middle of the night and even made house calls, using her motorized wheelchair and public buses. "She was sicker than most of her patients but didn't let it stop her," Dr. Greene said. First Paper on Subject

Dr. Laubenstein and Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien wrote the first paper to be published in a medical journal on the alarming appearance of Kaposi's sarcoma, a previously rare disease of lesions of the skin and other tissues. Most of the cases were in young gay men suffering a puzzling collapse of the immune system.

Recalling one of the first cases, she described a 33-year-old man with two purple spots behind his ears. Initially he responded to the cancer drugs she prescribed. But 18 months later he was dead, his body covered with 75 lesions.

Many more cases followed. By May 1982, she had seen 62 patients with AIDS -- a fourth of the national total recorded at the time. She said then that "this problem certainly is not going away."

Her father, George Laubenstein, said yesterday, "She told us from the very beginning that this is going to be a terrible epidemic."