Medical Geography as Human Ecology: The Dimension of Population Movement

Abstract

NO NE of the greatest hazards resulting from mismanagement of the environment and from ecological arrogance is an increase in human illness. Such diverse deteriorations of health as the rise of cancer in the American population, the spread of schistosomiasis in Africa with the extension of irrigated agriculture, the carnage being wrought by the automobile around the world, and, most poignantly, the existing magnitude of malnutrition and its consequences have shattered the entrenched prepossession of health professionals with the germ theory of disease. This change of paradigm, which has been accompanied by a shift in orientation from disease to health and by a consequent need to define, assess, and preserve health,1 offers an obvious invitation for geographical contributions. Health professionals frequently wonder how medical geography differs from epidemiology, or what geographers do that health planners do not. These are not idle questions, for in fact most models in medical geography have come from epidemiology or from health planners. More recently, the conceptual framework has been enriched by human ecologists working in anthropology and medicine as well as in geography. In this paper I summarize some of the developments in medical geography as human ecology and offer one approach to the problem of entering the holistic system of interaction between population and health environments.