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Public Health Books for the Bedside Table

Posted on: Saturday, 28 May 2005, 03:00 CDT

Public Health Books for the Bedside Table

Journal of Public Health Policy (2005) 26, 140-141.

doi:10.1057/palgrave.jphp.32,00012.

At the Global Forum on Health Research in Arusha, Tanzania, far from our computers, Medline, and e-mail, we engaged a favorite public health historian in one of our favorite topics - great public health books. We and Elizabeth Fee lamented the disappearing opportunity of the chance to read public health for enjoyment. Today, most of our public health reading is not reading at all, but searching, downloading, printing, and then poring carefully over the selected article for the information we were seeking.

We remembered fondly a stack of books about public health, which we had enjoyed reading and which had played a formative role in our public health educations. As editors and writers, and quietly between ourselves, we admitted that we really appreciated good writing, and when reading for enjoyment, we had a strong preference for engaging prose. Although we had always been prepared to grapple with complex and challenging ideas, we resented the occasions when it was the writing rather than the ideas that had presented the challenge.

We swapped great reads: Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People; Joshua Horn's Away with All Pests; A.L. Cochrane's Effectiveness and Efficiency in Health Services, and so on.

We realized it would be possible to create a book list for our bedside tables; informative public health books sufficiently well written so that they might displace novels and current magazines for bedtime enjoyment. Rather than believe that we could assemble this list ourselves, we have decided to challenge our readers. Help us create the Bedside Table Book List of great public health reading. To make this process work, we have created a minimal set of rules for submissions:

* Pick a book or play - fiction or non-fiction - and not an article or short story.

* The writing itself should be engaging and enjoyable.

* The content should enhance the reader's understanding of public health.

We invite you to nominate books for the list. Please send us the author, title, and if you have it, the name of the publisher and the date and city of publication. Then, in a few sentences, describe the book and perhaps what it meant for your understanding of public health. And tell us why you believe it should be on the list.

We plan to publish the list later this year or next. We hope it will encourage all of you who like to read to delve into the enjoyable books that influenced your colleagues' understanding of public health.

ANTHONY ROBBINS and ELIZABETH FEE

Copyright Journal of Public Health Policy 2005

Source: Journal of Public Health Policy

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