Public Health Reading List

The Book List*

Antanovsky, A. (1987). Unravelling the Mystery of Health. Jossey-Boss

Ashton, J. (2019). Practising Public Health: An Eyewitness Account. Oxford University Press. [publisher page]

Bergstrom, C. T., & West, J. D. (2020). Calling bullshit: the art of skepticism in a data-driven world. Random House.

Boseley, S. (2014). The Shape We're in: How Junk Food and Diets are Shortening Our Lives. Faber & Faber.

Briggs, C. L. (2003). Stories in the time of cholera: Racial profiling during a medical nightmare. Univ of California Press.

Carson, R. (2002). Silent spring. Penguin Classics

Cederström, C., & Spicer, A. (2015). The Wellness Syndrome. John Wiley & Sons.

Colgrove, J. (2011). Epidemic City: The Politics of Public Health in New York. Russell Sage Foundation.

Crofton, S. J., & Simpson, D. (2002). Tobacco: a global threat. Hong Kong: Macmillan.

Davies, S., & Pearson-Stuttard, J. (2020). Whose Health Is It, Anyway?. Oxford University Press.

Dorling, D. (2015). Injustice: Why social inequality still persists. Policy Press.

Epstein, H. (2007). The invisible cure: Africa, the West, and the fight against AIDS. Macmillan.

Farmer, P. (2004). Pathologies of power: Health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. Univ of California Press.

Foege, W. (2011). House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox. University of California Press.

Freudenberg, N. (2014). Lethal but legal: corporations, consumption, and protecting public health. Oxford University Press

Galea, S. (2017). Healthier: Fifty thoughts on the foundations of population health. Oxford University Press. [google books] [blogs by the author]

Garrett, L. (2003). Betrayal of trust: the collapse of global public health. Oxford University Press

Goldacre, B. (2010). Bad science: quacks, hacks, and big pharma flacks. McClelland & Stewart.

Halpern, D. (2015). Inside the Nudge Unit: How small changes can make a big difference. Random House.

Heyman, G. M. (2009). Addiction: A Disorder of Choice. Harvard University Press.

Johnson, S. (2006). The ghost map: The story of London's most terrifying epidemic--and how it changed science, cities, and the modern world. Penguin.

Keshavjee, M. S. (2014). Blind spot: how neoliberalism infiltrated global health. Univ of California Press.

Kessler, D. A. (2001). A question of intent: A great American battle with a deadly industry. Public Affairs.

Kidder, T. (2003). Mountains beyond mountains: healing the world: the quest of Dr. Paul Farmer. Random House

Marmot, M. (2004). Status Syndrome: How Your Social Standing Directly Affects Your Health and Life Expectancy. Bloomsbury

Marmot, M. (2015). The health gap: the challenge of an unequal world. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Meadows, D. (2012). Thinking in systems: a primer. Chelsea Green Publishing Co

McCartney, M. (2016) The State of Medicine: Keeping the Promise of the NHS. Pinter & Martin

McNeill, W. H., & McNeill, W. (1998). Plagues and peoples. Anchor.

Moss, M. (2013). Salt, sugar, fat: how the food giants hooked us. Random House.

Nestle, M. (2015). Soda politics: taking on big soda (and winning). Oxford University Press, USA.

Offit, P. A. (2007). Vaccinated: one man's quest to defeat the world's deadliest diseases. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.

Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2015). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. London: Bloomsbury

Perez, C. C. (2019). Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men. Random House. [google books]

Palmer, G. (2009). The politics of breastfeeding: when breasts are bad for business. Pinter & Martin Publishers.

Pendergrast, M. (2010). Inside the outbreaks: the elite medical detectives of the epidemic intelligence service. HMH.

Phillips, B. (2020) How to Fight Inequality: And Why That Fight Needs You. Wiley. [Publisher Site]

Pinker, S. (2014). The village effect: Why face-to-face contact matters. Atlantic Books Ltd.

Pisani, E. (2010). The wisdom of whores: Bureaucrats, brothels and the business of AIDS. Granta Books.

Prasad, V. K. (2020). Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer. JHU Press.

Quinones, S. (2015). Dreamland: the true tale of America's opiate epidemic. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Rayner, G., & Lang, T. (2012). Ecological public health: reshaping the conditions for good health. Routledge.

Rhodes, J. (2013). The end of plagues: the global battle against infectious disease. Macmillan.

Ritchie, S. (2020) Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science. Random House

Roberts, I., & Edwards, P. (2010). The energy glut: the politics of fatness in an overheating world. Zed Books Limited.

Rose, G. A., Khaw, K. T., & Marmot, M. (2008). Rose's strategy of preventive medicine: the complete original text. Oxford University Press, USA.

Rosling, H., Rosling, O., & Rönnlund, A. R. (2018). Factfulness: Ten reasons we're wrong about the world–And why things are better than you think: Sceptre. https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/ (and the accompanying website https://www.gapminder.org/ )

Scheidel, W. (2017). The great leveler: Violence and the history of inequality from the stone age to the twenty-first century. Princeton University Press.

Schrecker, T., & Bambra, C. (2015). How politics makes us sick: Neoliberal epidemics. Springer.

Shilts, R. (2007). And the band played on: Politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic, 20th-anniversary edition. Macmillan.

Spinney, L (2018) Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World Paperback. Penguin

Stephens-Davidowitz, S. (2017). Everybody lies: big data, new data, and what the internet can tell us about who we really are. HarperLuxe.

Thompson, M (2016) Enough Said: What's gone wrong with the language of politics? Bodley Head

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008) Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin

Waltner-Toews, D. (2020) On Pandemics: Deadly Diseases from Bubonic Plague to Coronavirus. Greystone Books [publisher site]

Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2010). The spirit level: why equality is better for everyone. Penguin UK.

Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2018). The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Wellbeing Allen Lane

* There are plenty of good textbooks around and my institutional reading lists include many of these. This list is intended to be a list of affordable, readable titles that can inform and educate across a range of public health sub-disciplines.

* Many of the titles on the list are relevant and contemporary yet there are a few older titles that have earned their place by being recommended or repeatedly cited as being important in the field.

* The original list has been improved significantly thanks to a number of generous twitter contributors and my thanks go out to Harry Rutter, Mark Petticrew, Ash Paul, Piers Simey and Anne Murphy for getting involved. (update...4/11/16...thanks to all of those that RT'd this tweet and further thanks to the following people that also contributed to this list...@rkfmiller @jonny1990 @C_rouzell and @sridhartweet. (further updated June, 2018)

This tweet by Tim Elwell-Sutton @tim_esPH was titled, "10 Classic Papers Everyone in Public Health Should Read" and then invited others to add their own papers. There were some great recommendations throughout so I took the liberty of capturing as many as possible in one place to add to this page.

Alonso, Y. (2004). The biopsychosocial model in medical research: the evolution of the health concept over the last two decades. Patient education and counseling, 53(2), 239-244. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0738-3991(03)00146-0

Almedom, A. M., & Glandon, D. (2007). Resilience is not the absence of PTSD any more than health is the absence of disease. Journal of loss and Trauma, 12(2), 127-143. https://doi.org/10.1080/15325020600945962

Bauer, G. R. (2014). Incorporating intersectionality theory into population health research methodology: challenges and the potential to advance health equity. Social Science & Medicine, 110, 10-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.03.022

Blaxter, M. (1997). Whose fault is it? People's own conceptions of the reasons for health inequalities. Social Science & Medicine, 44(6), 747-756. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(96)00192-X

Byrne, D., & Callaghan, G. (2013). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. Routledge.

Calman, K. (2009). Beyond the ‘nanny state’: stewardship and public health. Public Health, 123(1), e6-e10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2008.10.025

Cochrane AL (1972) Effectiveness and efficiency: Random reflections on health services. Nuffield Trust. Available at: www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/research/effectiveness-and-efficiency-random-reflections-on-health-services

Doll, R., & Hill, A. B. (1950). Smoking and carcinoma of the lung. British Medical Journal, 2(4682), 739. doi: 10.1136/bmj.2.4682.739

Incredible insight into how humans make sense of a world which includes illness and death.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1937). Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande (Vol. 12). London: Oxford. [pdf]

Farmer, P. (1999). Pathologies of power: rethinking health and human rights. American Journal of Public Health, 89(10), 1486-1496. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdfplus/10.2105/AJPH.89.10.1486

Galea, S., Riddle, M., & Kaplan, G. A. (2009). Causal thinking and complex system approaches in epidemiology. International journal of epidemiology, 39(1), 97-106. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyp296

"Those who need it most, have the worst healthcare." - The Inverse Care Law

Hart, J. T. (1971). The inverse care law. The Lancet, 297(7696), 405-412. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(71)92410-X

Hill, A. B. (1965). The environment and disease: association or causation? Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003591576505800503 or https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0141076814562718

“The major threat to health in the world is modern medicine.” Ivan Illich

Illich, I. (1976). Limits to medicine: medical nemesis: the expropriation of health. London: Marion Boyars. [Review http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jech.57.12.928]

Huber, M., Knottnerus, J. A., Green, L., van der Horst, H., Jadad, A. R., Kromhout, D., ... & Schnabel, P. (2011). How should we define health?. Bmj, 343, d4163. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.d4163

Krieger, N. (1994). Epidemiology and the web of causation: has anyone seen the spider?. Social Science & Medicine, 39(7), 887-903. https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-9536(94)90202-X [www]

Link, B. G., & Phelan, J. (1995). Social conditions as fundamental causes of disease. Journal of health and social behavior, 80-94. DOI: 10.2307/2626958

Maibach, E. W., Nisbet, M., Baldwin, P., Akerlof, K., & Diao, G. (2010). Reframing climate change as a public health issue: an exploratory study of public reactions. BMC Public Health, 10(1), 299. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-10-299

Michael Marmot on the concept of a social gradient.

Marmot, M. G., Stansfeld, S., Patel, C., North, F., Head, J., White, I., ... & Smith, G. D. (1991). Health inequalities among British civil servants: the Whitehall II study. The Lancet, 337(8754), 1387-1393. https://doi.org/10.1016/0140-6736(91)93068-K

Morris, J. N., Heady, J. A., Raffle, P. A. B., Roberts, C. G., & Parks, J. W. (1953). Coronary heart-disease and physical activity of work. The Lancet, 262(6796), 1111-1120. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(53)91495-0

Robinson, W. S. (2009). Ecological correlations and the behavior of individuals. International Journal of Epidemiology, 38(2), 337-341. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyn357

Rose, G. (2001). Sick individuals and sick populations. International Journal of Epidemiology, 30(3), 427-432. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/30.3.427

Sartorius, N. (2006). The meanings of health and its promotion. Croatian medical journal, 47(4), 662. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2080455/

Schwartz, S. (1994). The fallacy of the ecological fallacy: the potential misuse of a concept and the consequences. American journal of public health, 84(5), 819-824. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.84.5.819

Smith, G. D. (2011). Epidemiology, epigenetics and the ‘Gloomy Prospect’: embracing randomness in population health research and practice. International Journal of Epidemiology, 40(3), 537-562. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyr117

Smith, R. (1985). " Bitterness, shame, emptiness, waste": an introduction to unemployment and health. British Medical Journal 291(6501), 1024. doi: 10.1136/bmj.291.6501.1024 or https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1416947/pdf/bmjcred00469-0036.pdf

Sydenstricker, E. (1935). The Changing Concept of Public Health. The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 13(4), 301-310. https://www.milbank.org/wp-content/uploads/mq/volume-13/issue-04/13-4-The-Changing-Concept-of-Public-Health.pdf

Screening is intuitively appealing. But it can sometimes do more harm than good.

Wilson, J. M. G., Jungner, G., & World Health Organization. (1968). Principles and practice of screening for disease. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/37650 . Also see a more recent opinion piece (2019) https://doi.org/10.1177/0141076819891422

Thanks to @jimmcmanusph , @RupertSuckling and @KelechiNnoaham for responding so generously to my tweet request for favourite PH Leadership titles.

Atkinson, J., Loftus, E., & Jarvis, J. (2015). The art of change making. [Full text] Interactive version available at https://www.leadershipcentre.org.uk/artofchangemaking/ [presentation] [The Leadership Centre's Article Library]

Block, P. (1993). Stewardship: Choosing service over self-interest. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. [GoodReads]

Heffernan, M., Twitter - @M_Heffernan - Books

Huxham, C., & Vangen, S. (2013). Managing to collaborate: The theory and practice of collaborative advantage. Routledge [GoodReads]

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th Ed) John Wiley & Sons [Amazon]

Kotter, J. (2020) 8 Steps to accelerate change (updated for a COVID world) e-book https://www.kotterinc.com/research-and-insights/8-steps-accelerating-change-ebook-2020/

Poole, E. (2017). Leadersmithing: Revealing the Trade Secrets of Leadership. Bloomsbury Publishing. [GoogleBooks] [prompt cards]

Scharmer, O. (2018). The essentials of theory U: Core principles and applications. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. [@ottoscharmer1] [GoogleBooks]

Seddon, J. (2008). Systems thinking in the public sector. Triarchy Press. [GoogleBooks]

Tate, W. (2013). Managing leadership from a systemic perspective. Centre for Progressive Leadership, A White Paper. [www]

Wiggins, L., & Hunter, H. (2016). Relational Change: The Art and Practice of Changing Organizations. Bloomsbury Publishing. [GoogleBooks]

• Pai, M. (2018) If you had to read one book on global health... https://naturemicrobiologycommunity.nature.com/posts/41300-if-you-had-to-read-one-book-on-global-health

• Popular Public Health Books on goodreads - www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/public-health

• Sridhar Venkatapuram's List - https://venkatapuram.tumblr.com/

Original Post date: 02-Nov-2016

Last updated: June 2021