Course Description

This course surveys medical geography, a sub-discipline that encompasses a broad range of geographical work on health and health care. What distinguishes medical geography from the discipline of geography as a whole is its thematic focus on health and health care. In other words, medical geography does not differ from the rest of geography in theory or method. It is distinctive only in subject matter.

This course uses medical geographic examples to explore three groups of theoretical approaches within geography: ecological approaches, which systematically analyze relationships between peoples and their environments; spatial approaches, which employ maps and spatial statistics to identify patterns of single and associated variables; and social approaches, including political economy and humanist perspectives, which address issues related to both space and place. Students in the course are encouraged continually to consider the relationships among research questions, philosophical assumptions, and appropriate methods as well as to question the complementarity and inherent tensions among different theoretical approaches.

The goals of this course are several. First, health and health care are revealed to be complex phenomena that can be understood only through a judicious combination of theoretical frameworks, questions, and techniques. One has to decide which questions are worth pursuing and how to proceed most productively to address them. Second, students have an opportunity to assess critically the strengths and shortcomings of different ways of “doing geography.” For some this entails a reconsideration of what they already know of geography. For others it is an introduction to the discipline. Third, students are encouraged to recognize the ways in which people adapt to and change the environments that in turn shape their own health. Fourth, international comparisons and attention to links among places across scales (from the global to the local) demonstrate that geography (spatial arrangements and place) matters.