Medical geography is a sub-discipline of geography, focused on understanding spatial patterns of health and disease as related to the natural and social environment. Conventionally, there are two primary areas of research within medical geography: the first deals with the spatial distribution and determinants of morbidity and mortality, while the second deals with health planning, help-seeking behavior, and the provision of health services.
History
Relationships between place and health have long been recognized throughout human history, predating modern health delivery systems and providing insights into the transmission of infectious agents, well before the germ theory paradigm shift in the late 1800s. Throughout history there have been many examples of place and location playing major roles in shaping perceptions of health and risk. The associations between geographical characteristics and health outcomes, which essentially form the foundation of modern medical geography, were recognized more than 2,000 years ago by Hippocrates in his treatise ’’On Airs, Waters, and Places’’. The industrial revolution in the 1700s brought with it a plethora of novel public health issues stemming from rapid urban development and poor sanitation, conditions which fueled the development of disease mapping, or medical cartography. A precursor to medical geography, medical cartography arose from the need to communicate spatial discrepancies in risk for diseases of unknown cause, particularly urban outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever. One of the most prominent figures in both epidemiology and medical geography is John Snow, the physician who correctly identified the source of exposure during the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak. Snow’s famous 1854 map of the cholera outbreak graphically demonstrates that cases were clustered around the Broad Street pump, the source of contaminated water that fueled the epidemic. This map led Snow to identify the contaminated pump and conclude that cholera was a waterborne illness, a remarkable feat given that bacteria were unknown to science at the time. While Snow’s contributions to medical geography and epidemiology are irrefutable, the role of the map in this particular investigation is somewhat overstated. Dot maps of cases produced during the industrial period were powerful tools in communicating the findings of traditional epidemiological measures of association, but their role as analytic tools were restricted due to technological limitations. Modern medical geography arose in the United States in the 1950s with the pioneering work of Jacques May, who worked as a surgeon in Thailand and Vietnam and noticed differences between the health experiences of his patients in these locations and in Europe. Although the notion that the environment could influence human health has been understood since Hippocrates, medical geography as envisioned by May built on this idea, describing medical geography as working to understand the nature of the relationships between pathogen transmission and geographical factors. May soon began mapping global distributions of disease and exploring the cultural and environmental factors that influenced these distributions.
Areas of study
The first area of study within medical geography has been described as geographical epidemiology or disease geography and is focused on the spatial patterns and processes of health and disease outcomes. This area of inquiry can be differentiated from the closely related discipline of epidemiology in that it uses concepts and methods from geography, allowing an ecologic perspective on health that considers how interactions between humans and the environment result in observed health outcomes. The second area of study focused on the planning and provision of health services, often with a focus on the spatial organization of health systems and exploration of how this arrangement affects accessibility of care.
