London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

We congratulate you on having chosen this MSc, which is targeted at practising physicians and offers the broadest choice of study modules of any at LSHTM. We hope you will enjoy your time in London, that you will benefit from the unique atmosphere of LSHTM, and that you will acquire knowledge and skills that will enhance your effectiveness in meeting the challenges of Tropical Medicine & International Health in the 21st century. We can promise you that you will make friends from all over the world and have an interesting time.

Welcome Week timetable

You do not need to read anything in advance, however the first term covers material for the DTM&H: medical parasitology and entomology; tropical public health, clinical teaching,  and an introduction to clinical epidemiology, clinical trials  and the medical literature. If you want to prepare yourself gently for these topics, we suggest taking a look at the following:

- A basic tropical medicine textbook e.g. Lecture Notes: Tropical Medicine (G. Gill, N. Beeching)
- A basic book about statistics e.g. Essentials of Medical Statistics (B. Kirkwood, J. Sterne)
- An introduction to critically appraising and reading the literature e.g. How to Read a Paper (Trisha Greenhalgh)
- An introduction to clinical trials e.g. Fundamentals of Clinical Trials (Friedman, Furberg, DeMets)
- A basic epidemiology book e.g. Epidemiology (Gordis) or Epidemiology: a research manual for South Africa (Gina Joubert, Rodney Ehrlich) – this is the one written most from a developing country perspective

As a ‘big’ tropical medicine textbook we recommend Principles of Medicine in Africa for those of you who expect to work in Africa; but we do not recommend you buy this before coming unless you have direct access to the ELBS edition via a developing country address or a stated intention to practice in low-/middle-income countries, as we can get good deals via the editors and publishers.