Medical geography
Topic: Human Geography: Nature, Scope and Approaches · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 1 "Human Geography: Nature and Scope"
Meaning
Medical geography is a sub-field of social geography. Its sister discipline is epidemiology, the study of how diseases spread in a population. It maps where diseases occur and how they spread. It also looks for the environmental causes behind them, such as water, climate or crowding. It studies who can reach health care and who cannot. Its founding case is John Snow's 1854 cholera map of London. Snow mapped deaths around one water pump and showed that cholera spread through water.
Example
Kala-azar is a disease spread by sandflies. It has been concentrated in Bihar in the middle Ganga plain. Medical geographers map these disease belts so that spraying and treatment reach the right villages.
Don't confuse with
- Epidemiology: it studies the causes and spread of disease in a population. Medical geography adds the spatial view: where cases cluster and why.
Related concepts
- Social geography
- Cultural geography
- Gender geography
- Historical geography
- Geography of leisure
- Geography of social well-being