Chapter 1: Histories of medical geography

Abstract

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,

From Siam to New York: Jacques May and the ‘foundation’ of medical geography

“…As Valençius notes, tropical medicine and not medical geography emerged as the scientific rubric for investigating diseases in the tropics because 'the concept of 'environment' lost much of its holistic embrace, becoming instead of a unified set of influences a more narrow harbourer of pathogens'. 88 However, May constructed an intellectual space for medical geography by presenting it as the study of the total environment within which disease pathogens emerge. As such, May reconfigured the relationship between tropical medicine and medical geography because the two were presented as distinct but closely related forms of scientific investigation.…”

“…33 Though this approach was, as already shown, well established, it was May's work in this area that helped to establish disease ecology and himself as central to the development of medical geography. 34 May located medical geography in the same historical trajectory that Garrison and Light had established before him.…”

“…Stated differently, it is marked by the search for ancestors. 2 The story usually begins in the writings of Hippocrates before re-emerging in the work of an 18th century Prussian medical officer, Leonhard Ludwig Finke. 3 Following in the Hippocratic tradition, Finke sought to demonstrate a connection between the geographical location of disease and the prevailing physical, social, and cultural features of the surrounding environment.…”

Cancer in the tropics: geographical pathology and the formation of cancer epidemiology

“…Yet it remains to be seen if social scientists today are more successful than Henry Sigerist in convincing biomedical researchers of the relevance of their contributions. At the same time, geography and other fields have continued to study the relation between health, social forces, and place throughout the late twentieth century (Valenčius 2000;Guthman and Mansfield 2013). The question may thus be not only about finding new epistemic openings but also about urging international organizations to take questions of environmental health seriously.…”

Putting health inequities on the map: social epidemiology meets medical/health geography––an ecosocial perspective

“…I am heartened by his emphasis on the importance of tracing the historical lineages of the many disciplines involved in population health research. His article makes an important contribution to reviewing the longstanding and deep connections--sometimes severed, sometimes ignored, but nevertheless intrinsically present (Numbers 2000;Valencius 2000)--between epidemiology and medical geography. I likewise appreciate Koch's grounding of the history of these fields in their social, political, economic, and ecologic contexts, an approach that helps explain not only the growing post-18th c CE emphasis on political and administrative (and not just ostensibly ''natural'') boundaries, but also periods of greater and lesser concern about health inequities in both epidemiology and medical geography.…”