Since the beginning of the 21st century, international public health institutions, governments, as well as the scientific community, have promoted a holistic approach to health issues. This is also known as "One Health" and links human, animal, and environmental health. The multiplication of (re)emerging diseases from the 1970s onwards, as well as the growing concern regarding antimicrobial resistance, had indeed dashed scientists' hope to "close the book on infectious diseases" and led to the idea that human health was inextricably linked to environmental issues. 1 In recent decades, historians have also extensively reflected on the relationships between the environment and health. 2 This collective endeavour culminated in special issues in Medical History (2000), Osiris (2004), and Bulletin of The History of Medicine (2012), titled "Medical Geography," "Landscapes of Exposure," and "Modern Airs, Waters and Places," respectively. 3 Far from being characteristic of modernity, such place-centred approaches to health are almost as old as Western medicine, since they lie at the heart of the Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, Places (ca. 430 BCE). Two millennia after Hippocrates' death, the Greek physician was still widely mentioned and the influence of climate on human beings was still a cornerstone of medical thought. However, semantic stability does not necessarily imply lexical stability, since the very concepts of "climate" and "environment" have changed drastically over the last three centuries. Thus, it reminds us of statistics, which Alain Desrosières compared to a knife whose handle and blade had been changed and whose ipseity is in question. 4 Moreover, ideas and practices often have interconnected but discrete This famous quote is often mistakenly attributed to William Stewart, who never uttered it, but this hope was widely shared in the medical community;
