A flat past? History, environment, topography, and medicine

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article uses topography to explore connections between environmental and medical perspectives in France between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on examples from rural public hygiene, it addresses how physical and human geography in rural environments affected health and medicine, raising questions about how the topography of a landscape influenced medical responses to the environment. Rather than returning to the idea of the environment as a constraint on possible paths in History, it re-examines the health connotations of the French countryside before turning to the lesser-known terrain of how a locale’s topography informed efforts to regulate the relationship between medicine, society, and nature. The article argues that greater sensitivity to how people were influenced by the nature of local topographies helps historians think in different ways about embodied local geographies and their role in medicine.