Medical History

http://journals.cambridge.org/MDH
Additional services for Medical

History:

Email alerts: Click here

Subscriptions: Click here
Commercial reprints: Click here
Terms of use : Click here

Preface and Acknowledgements

Medical History / Volume 44 / Supplement S20 / January 2000, pp ix - ix

DOI: 10.1017/S0025727300073221, Published online: 16 November 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0025727300073221

How to cite this article:
(2000). Preface and Acknowledgements. Medical History, 44, pp ix-ix doi:10.1017/
S0025727300073221
Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/MDH, IP address: 177.40.72.38 on 22 Jun 2015

Preface and Acknowledgements

Medical geography originated during the first half of the nineteenth century, at
the crossroads of reformist medical science with the new physical geography. Its
early practitioners were concerned with the global distribution of human diseases as
a function of large-scale, environmental conditions. In Germany, France and Britain,
large bodies of literature on medical geography were produced. The new subject
significantly overlapped with epidemiology, medical topography, medical statistics,
hygiene and especially also with colonial and tropical medicine.
In recent years, medical geography has experienced a resurgence of popularity, as
have in general our concerns with the relationship of health with the environment.
In the wake of this resurgence, historians have begun looking at medical geography
in historical perspective, examining its practices and theories, its national traditions
and the socio-economic conditions of its nineteenth-century popularity. These historiographical studies have received further stimulation from the growing interest in
environmental history, and in the history of colonial and tropical medicine, as well
as of nineteenth-century Humboldtian science.
By the mid-1990s, the time appeared ripe for a spring harvest of the results of
these studies, and a symposium was held on 'Medical Geography in Historical
Perspective' at the Institut fur Geschichte der Medizin (now Institut fur Ethik und
Geschichte der Medizin) of the Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen (13-15 June
1996). Most of the chapters in this volume are based on papers presented at this
symposium. Conevery Bolton Valencius kindly offered a second contribution, on the
historiography of medical geography, which proved a fitting introduction to the
volume. Also the chapters by Michael Osborne and Frank Barrett, who could not
be present, were added at a later stage. The chapter on 'Humboldtian Representations'
is based on the symposium exhibition, 'Early Maps of Medical Geography', organized
by Karen Wonders. The lively and substantive participation in the symposium by
William F Bynum, Meike Cordes, Richard Grove, Gerry Kearns, Melinda Meade
and Ulrich Trohler is gratefully acknowledged. The editor wishes to thank David
Livingstone for constructive comments on early drafts of the chapters, Wolfgang
Boker and Caroline Tonson-Rye for editorial hard work and Gregor Schuchardt for
preparing the index.

ix