A reference library for public health and social thought

• Public Health Library

  A curated guide to authoritative public-health resources — international agencies, journals, and topic directories — organised by subject and region.

• Quotations

  Selected passages from Anthony Giddens, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse and other writers on society, modernity and power.

• Indigenous Peoples

  Declarations, charters and reference material concerning the health, rights and self-determination of indigenous and circumpolar peoples.

Where to start

A few of the most-consulted pages, if you want a sense of the collection:

• WWW Virtual Library: Public Health — the curated public-health directory, by subject and region.
• Anthony Giddens — selected quotations and Theodor W. Adorno — the largest of the social-theory collections.
• Indigenous Peoples' Seattle Declaration — the full text of the 1999 declaration, reproduced as issued.
• Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse — on hegemony and one-dimensional society.

The Public Health Library

The public-health section continues the tradition of the WWW Virtual Library: Public Health — part of the WWW Virtual Library, the oldest subject catalogue on the web, begun in the early 1990s. The Virtual Library model was simple and durable: rather than ranking pages by algorithm, a subject specialist gathered and annotated the resources that mattered in a field, so that a reader could see the shape of the literature at a glance.

That curatorial approach is preserved here. Resources are arranged both by subject — women's and child health, occupational and environmental health, global and community health, ethics, demography, and the journals that serve the field — and by region, with country-level guides pointing to national health bodies and the relevant World Health Organization regional offices. Where the original directory's links had decayed over the years, dead entries have been removed and current authoritative sources verified, so the guide remains usable rather than a list of broken addresses.

Quotations and social theory

The quotation collections gather passages from writers who shaped twentieth-century thought about society: Anthony Giddens on modernity and structuration, Theodor Adorno on the culture industry, Antonio Gramsci on hegemony, Herbert Marcuse on one-dimensional society, and others spanning philosophy, economics and letters. Each passage is attributed to the work in which it appears, with page references where they were recorded, so that quotations can be traced back to their source.

Indigenous peoples

The third section reproduces declarations, charters and reference documents concerned with the health, rights and self-determination of indigenous and circumpolar peoples — among them the Indigenous Peoples' Seattle Declaration and Australian and Arctic material — alongside directories of the organisations working in the field. These are primary documents, presented as issued.

About the sources

Much of the public-health and quotation material was compiled by the health-promotion researcher Eberhard Wenzel, whose scholarly website assembled these resources from the late 1990s onward. Where a page reproduces work he compiled or wrote, his name is given as the source; primary documents are attributed to the bodies that issued them. The library is maintained as an open educational reference, and the texts and documents remain the property of their respective authors and rights-holders.

The three collections share a common thread. Public health, social theory and indigenous rights are not separate concerns but overlapping ones: the social determinants of health, the way power and culture shape who stays well, and the rights of communities to govern their own wellbeing all run between them. Keeping them in one library — accurately sourced, with dead links pruned and quotations traceable to their works — is the whole point. Corrections and suggestions are welcome via the contact page.

Frequently asked questions