Histories of Medical Geography CONEVERY BOLTON VALENCIUS Like would-be claimants arguing over a family inheritance, different disciplines have created different genealogies of medical geography, even as they share an interest in capturing its riches. Over the course of the twentieth century, historians of medicine and geographers have each created their own histories of the relations between health and environment.' Yet for both historians and geographers, medical geography has offered the tantalizing possibility for linking historical insight with the concerns of current practice. Again and again, this imperative has structured historical narratives, even as the details differ according to allegiance. The founders of the modern discipline of the history of medicine in Europe and the United States imbued the young field with a profound sense of the importance of geographic understanding. In the 1930s and 1940s, as the "polymathic Leipzig students", the German-trained cadre of Henry Sigerist, George Rosen, and Erwin Ackerknecht, along with the American Fielding H Garrison, fanned out across the American academic world, they were united not only by an energetic interest in the history of medicine, but by an enduring fascination for the relations between history,

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CONEVERY BOLTON VALENCIUS In the autumn of 1815, Justus and Eliza Post and their young children arrived in St Louis after a long, arduous journey from New York. They came to establish themselves in the Missouri Territory, early movers in a westward tide of American emigration that would by mid-century stretch to the Pacific Ocean. In correspondence with his older brother John, back in Vermont, Justus Post made explicit the hopes that had animated him in this "remove" and guided his impressions of the "new" territories beyond the Mississippi. Post sought land on which to establish his family, and he also planned to profit from volatile prices by purchasing tracts for later resale to other emigrants and investors. Speculator and farmer, Post looked to the bottomland of the Missouri with a calculating and hopeful eye.' His impressions are telling. Immediately after arriving in St Louis, Justus Post reported back to John that "I see nothing to hinder its being an extremely healthy

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