The role of French-language contributors to the development of medical geography (1782–1933)

Abstract

In the literature it is L. L. Finke's three volume work Versuch einer allgemeinen medicinisch-praktischen Geographie, 1792–1795, that is commonly cited as the first to use the term “medical geography”. However, Rofort's investigations on the 18th and 19th century development of medical topography in France (1987, 1988) has revealed that a French physician, Dehorne, used the term a decade earlier, and in 1784 Dehorne suggested that a project be undertaken by the Royal Medical Society of Paris on a “Medical Geography of France”. The proposal was debated in the Journal de Médecine Militaire in 1786. This correspondence probably is the earliest critique of the concept of medical geography. It was also the French who were the first to have entries on medical geography in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Dr. Jean-Noël Hallé wrote a lengthy piece conceptually placing medical geography as a foundation for medical hygienics in Encyclopédie Méthodique (1787, 1792). In 1817 Julien Virey wrote a 66 page entry on medical geography in the Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales. Throughout the nineteenth century authors writing in the French language continued to make advances and in 1933 the French geographer Max Sorre suggested new directions for the field in the light of bacteriological discoveries and the re-orientation of medicine.