RESUMO
Documentary evidence reveals that a German physician L.L. Finke produced a world map of diseases in 1792. This is much earlier than any world disease map previously known. Contrary to the contemporary literature in medical cartography this data proves that: (1) It was neither yellow fever nor cholera epidemics but indigenous diseases that were the catalyst for this earlier world disease map. (2) It predates Humboldt's influence on thematic mapping.
Assuntos
Epidemiologia/história , Geografia/história , Alemanha , História do Século XVIII , Humanos , Mapas como AssuntoRESUMO
The nineteenth-century English physician Alfred Haviland used the national mortality statistics for England and Wales to develop an elaborate geographical explanation based on map analysis for the cause of heart, cancer, and tuberculosis deaths. He found that females had higher rates for all three causes of death. However, although his technique was innovative his analysis was flawed.
Assuntos
Epidemiologia/história , Inglaterra/epidemiologia , Cardiopatias/epidemiologia , História do Século XIX , Humanos , Mapas como Assunto , Neoplasias/epidemiologia , Tuberculose/epidemiologia , País de Gales/epidemiologiaRESUMO
Daniel Drake's two volume study, Principal Diseases of the Interior of North America (1850-1854), is examined in the context of the medical geographical and geographical medical literature of the period. His work covers an in-depth examination of the-geography of the interior of the continent as it relates to disease occurrence. Drake's contribution appears to have occurred independently of the then contemporary European literature. Certainly in its method of research no one up to that point had developed an approach of examining, in such detail, the relationships between geography and disease over so vast an area. Drake is another example of a physician who turned to a geographical approach to better understand disease. The question arises as to what stimulated Drake into taking this approach, and what were the opinions of his study by North American and European critics? Although in the historical development of medical geography it is a major contribution, to date no medical geographer appears to have written an in depth analysis of his work.
Assuntos
Epidemiologia/história , Geografia/história , História do Século XIX , Humanos , América do NorteRESUMO
It is now 200 years since L. L. Finke wrote his treatise on a global medical geography, Versuch einer allgemeinen medicinisch-praktischen Geographie. It was both the most extensive book in substantive content, and the most detailed in conceptual discussion on medical geography written to that point. Although it is one of the foundation pieces of medical geography, modern day practitioners seldom refer to Finke's work. There are two main reasons for this: with the exception of two passages, the work has never been translated from the original German, and many contemporary medical geographers believe that the field only developed in the mid-twentieth century. This paper's purpose is to demonstrate that this last point is unfounded and that recognition of Finke's seminal contribution is long over-due. On the 200th anniversary of the publication of An Attempt at a General Medical-Practical Geography Finke's great achievement is honoured.
Assuntos
Geografia/história , Manuscritos Médicos como Assunto/história , Alemanha , História do Século XVIII , HumanosRESUMO
The name James Lind is not one usually associated with medical geography. Yet Lind's book, An Essay on the Incidence of Diseases in Hot Climates, written in 1768, is of great importance in the development of medical geography. When Finke wrote his medical geography a quarter of a century later he quoted extensively from Lind.