Health at the level of populations rather than patients.
13 topics · 14 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service
Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health · 1964
Reviews the accumulated pathological and epidemiological evidence to conclude officially that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, triggering the…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
On the Mode of Communication of Cholera
John Snow · 1855
Maps cholera deaths to a single water pump and establishes epidemiological reasoning before germ theory existed.
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
De Morbis Artificum Diatriba
Bernardino Ramazzini · 1700
Surveys dozens of trades to catalogue the diseases specific to each occupation and urges physicians to ask patients what work they do, founding…
+6 more at this level
12 of 14 works
Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health
Reviews the accumulated pathological and epidemiological evidence to conclude officially that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, triggering the first wave of American tobacco-control policy.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Health Organization
Quantifies ambient air pollution's toll in exposure and mortality by country, establishing outdoor air pollution as one of the largest single environmental health risks and one borne disproportionately by poorer countries.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Snow
Maps cholera deaths to a single water pump and establishes epidemiological reasoning before germ theory existed.
about 4.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Edwin Chadwick
Argues from surveys of disease and death across Britain that filth and poor drainage, not poverty itself, cause the fevers that shorten labourers' lives, and that sanitation works would cost less than the poor relief disease was causing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Austin Bradford Hill
Sets out nine considerations — strength, consistency, temporality, dose-response and the rest — for judging when an association is likely to be causal, while insisting none of them is a decisive test and that no formal rule can replace judgement.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Geoffrey Rose
Argues that the causes of individual cases and the causes of a population's disease rate are different questions, so shifting the whole distribution prevents more disease than treating the high-risk tail — while each individual who shifts gains almost nothing, the prevention paradox.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Bank
Argues that a defined package of cost-effective interventions, not maximal spending, should guide how poor countries and donors prioritise health spending, introducing the disability-adjusted life year to compare across diseases.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bernardino Ramazzini
Surveys dozens of trades to catalogue the diseases specific to each occupation and urges physicians to ask patients what work they do, founding occupational medicine as a distinct field of inquiry.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William Ogilvy Kermack & Anderson Gray McKendrick
Derives a compartmental model dividing a population into susceptible, infected and recovered groups, and shows mathematically why an epidemic burns out before everyone is infected — the threshold result underlying modern outbreak modelling.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kenneth J. Arrow
Argues that medical care fails the assumptions ordinary markets need — the patient cannot judge quality, and outcomes are uncertain — which is why institutions like insurance and licensing exist around it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alexander D. Langmuir
Argues systematic, continuous collection and analysis of disease data, not just investigating outbreaks after the fact, should be a core government function, laying out the surveillance concept behind the CDC's ongoing disease-tracking systems.
James M. G. Wilson & Gunnar Jungner
Sets out the criteria — a treatable disease, a reliable test, a detectable early stage — that a condition must meet before population screening for it does more good than harm.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.