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Preface and Acknowledgements
Medical History / Volume 44 / Supplement S20 / January 2000, pp
ix - ixDOI: 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
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Preface and Acknowledgements
Medical geography originated during the first half of the
nineteenth century, atthe crossroads of reformist medical science
with the new physical geography. Itsearly practitioners were
concerned with the global distribution of human diseases asa
function of large-scale, environmental conditions. In Germany,
France and Britain,large bodies of literature on medical geography
were produced. The new subjectsignificantly 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, ashave in general our concerns with the relationship
of health with the environment.In the wake of this resurgence,
historians have begun looking at medical geographyin historical
perspective, examining its practices and theories, its national
traditionsand the socio-economic conditions of its
nineteenth-century popularity. These his-toriographical studies
have received further stimulation from the growing interest
inenvironmental history, and in the history of colonial and
tropical medicine, as wellas 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
HistoricalPerspective' at the Institut fur Geschichte der Medizin
(now Institut fur Ethik undGeschichte der Medizin) of the
Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen (13-15 June1996). Most of the
chapters in this volume are based on papers presented at
thissymposium. Conevery Bolton Valencius kindly offered a second
contribution, on thehistoriography of medical geography, which
proved a fitting introduction to thevolume. Also the chapters by
Michael Osborne and Frank Barrett, who could notbe present, were
added at a later stage. The chapter on 'Humboldtian
Representations'is based on the symposium exhibition, 'Early Maps
of Medical Geography', organizedby Karen Wonders. The lively and
substantive participation in the symposium byWilliam F Bynum, Meike
Cordes, Richard Grove, Gerry Kearns, Melinda Meadeand Ulrich
Trohler is gratefully acknowledged. The editor wishes to thank
DavidLivingstone for constructive comments on early drafts of the
chapters, WolfgangBoker and Caroline Tonson-Rye for editorial hard
work and Gregor Schuchardt forpreparing the index.
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