Medical Geography
Dr. Berghaus’ Physikalischer Atlas. From the holdings of Harvard Map Collection/Social Sciences Program—Harvard College Library.
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Medical geography, a subdiscipline of geography, is an interdisciplinary and holistic study of health, illness, and disease by specialists from a wide variety of social, physical, and biological sciences. Working in different cultural systems and diverse biospheres, medical geographers examine the distribution of health-related phenomena over time and the ways in which these phenomena interact and determine the status of human health in a community.
Origins
Medical geographers credit the Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and his followers as the founders of medical geography. In his early treatise Airs, Waters, and Places, Hippocrates proposed that a person’s environment could adversely influence health or well-being by altering the equilibrium between the four bodily humors.
Medical Geographers in the 18th and 19th Centuries
The Europeans Leonhard Ludwig Finke, August Hirsch, and Caspar Fuchs upheld and continued the Hippocratic holistic tradition in the 18th and 19th centuries by organizing information abut human diseases in different cultures and in different environments.
In North America, Daniel Drake identified the geological, meteorological, and social determinants of disease during the settlement of the American West.
Medical Cartography
Medical cartography developed in Europe in the late 18th century to depict yellow-fever epidemics, and in the 19th-century maps showing cholera outbreaks proliferated as well as the geographical distribution of other diseases. In 1852, Heinrich Berghaus’ Physikalischer Atlas depicted the first maps of the global distribution of diseases.
Colonialism
In the age of European exploration and discovery, climate, topography, and ecology became closely linked to specific chronic and infectious diseases. The massive number of slaves brought to the West Indies by European colonists, for example, engendered yellow fever, just as it did on the North American mainland, where yellow fever became the most feared disease.
European exploration of the American West in the mid-18th century revealed the healing power of air in the Rocky Mountains, which became the treatment of choice for tuberculosis into the early 20th century.
Tropical Medicine and Climate
Hot climates have long been associated with specific tropical diseases such as malaria because the malaria parasite and its host, the Anopheles mosquito, require specific climatic conditions to survive and multiply. Cyclical climatic changes can also lead to epidemic outbreaks: the El Niño in the winter of 1878 turned the normally temperate North American South into a tropical climate and produced the worst yellow-fever epidemic in American history.
Medical Geography: Past and Present
Since its origin as part of the ancient Greek corpus of Hippocratic medicine in the 5th to 4th centuries BCE, medical geography has become an interdisciplinary study of health and disease in diverse cultures, geographic locations, and climates. Medical geography draws on the concepts and methodologies of a wide variety of cognate disciplines to contribute to the understanding of the factors that affect health and disease in different communities.
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Selected Contagion Resources
This is a partial list of digitized materials available in Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics. For additional materials on the topic “Medical Geography,” click here or search the collection’s Catalog and Full Text databases.
Web Pages
Publications
Origins
Medical Geographers in the 18th and 19th Centuries
Medical Cartography
Clemow, Frank G. The Geography of Disease. Cambridge : University Press, 1903.
Colonialism
Nathan, R. The Plague in India, 1896, 1897. Simla: Printed at the Govt. Central Print. Office, 1898.
Tropical Medicine and Climate
References
The following sources were used in writing this page.
Arnold, David., ed. Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–1900. Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1996.
Cliff, A. D., Peter Haggett, and Matthew Smallman-Raynor. World Atlas of Epidemic Diseases. London: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Crosby, Molly Caldwell. The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History. New York: Berkley Books, 2006.
Koch, Tom. Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine. Redlands, Calif.: ESRI Press, 2005.
Meade, Melinda S. Medical Geography. New York: Guilford Press, 1988.
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