Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Authors Like
Burke Harris discovered, through her own pediatric practice, that Adverse Childhood Experiences produce measurable, lasting physical health effects, and turned that finding into a public health movement that made her California’s first-ever Surgeon General. This list is for readers who want more of that territory: the researchers whose original ACEs findings she built on, and other clinicians and writers extending trauma research into medicine, addiction, and the body.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 authors · Medicine & Public Health · Childhood Trauma · Updated August 2026
Vincent Felitti
Felitti co-led the original 1998 Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study that Burke Harris’s entire career and advocacy is built on, the landmark research that first quantified the link between childhood adversity and adult chronic disease.
The foundational research behind The Deepest Well — Felitti’s original study is the scientific bedrock Burke Harris translated for a general audience and turned into policy.
Bessel van der Kolk
Van der Kolk’s research on trauma’s effects on the brain and nervous system complements Burke Harris’s focus on the body’s broader physical health — together they cover trauma’s impact on both mind and body across the lifespan.
Read him for the neurological and psychiatric side of what Burke Harris documents primarily through physical health outcomes.
Gabor Maté
Maté, also a physician, has spent his career making a closely related argument to Burke Harris’s — that early trauma is frequently the hidden driver of adult chronic illness and addiction — across books like When the Body Says No.
The closest physician-peer to Burke Harris, working similar terrain from a slightly different clinical angle.
Resmaa Menakem
Menakem’s work on how racialized trauma lives in the body shares Burke Harris’s core conviction that trauma has measurable physical consequences, though Menakem focuses specifically on racial trauma and somatic healing practices.
A useful complement if you’re interested in how Burke Harris’s ACEs framework intersects with race and intergenerational trauma specifically.
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Nakazawa’s Childhood Disrupted is a work of science journalism that translates ACEs research and its biological mechanisms for a general readership, covering very similar ground to The Deepest Well from a journalist’s rather than a physician’s perspective.
A close popular-science companion to Burke Harris’s book, useful if you want a second, journalist-written account of the same research.
John Bowlby
Bowlby’s foundational attachment theory, developed decades before the ACEs study, established the earlier scientific groundwork that the quality of early caregiving relationships shapes lifelong development — a precursor to the more medically focused ACEs research Burke Harris built her career on.
Read him for the developmental-psychology foundation that predates and underlies the more recent medical research Burke Harris made famous.
Where to start if you loved Nadine Burke Harris
If you want the original research, then read Vincent Felitti.
His landmark 1998 ACEs study is the scientific bedrock Burke Harris built her career on.
If you want the closest physician-peer, then read Gabor Maté.
He makes a closely related argument about trauma and adult chronic illness.
If you want the neuroscience side, then read Bessel van der Kolk.
The Body Keeps the Score covers trauma’s psychiatric and neurological effects.
If you want her own work first, then start with her book.
My complete guide to Nadine Burke Harris’s own book is the place to begin.
If you want more of this tradition, then keep exploring it.
My best books about trauma and healing list has the natural successors.
Frequently asked questions about authors like Nadine Burke Harris
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