Health geography

Also, the social model gives priority to the intimate encounters performed at non-traditional spaces of medicine and healthcare as well as to the individuals as health consumers.

[7] This alternative methodological approach means that medical geography is broadened to incorporate philosophies such as Marxian political economy, structuralism, social interactionism, humanism, feminism and queer theory.

The associations between geographical characteristics and health outcomes, which essentially form the foundation of modern medical geography, were recognized more than 2,000 years ago by Hippocrates in his treatise ’’On Airs, Waters, and Places’’ (ca.

[9] One of the most prominent figures in both epidemiology and medical geography is John Snow, the physician who correctly identified the source of exposure during the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak.

Snow's famous 1854 map of the cholera outbreak graphically demonstrates that cases were clustered around the Broad Street pump, the source of contaminated water that fueled the epidemic.

This map led Snow to identify the contaminated pump and conclude that cholera was a waterborne illness, a remarkable feat given that bacteria were unknown to science at the time.

Many people in the United States are not able to access proper healthcare because of inequality in health insurance and the means to afford medical care.

[citation needed] Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are used extensively in medical geography to visualize and analyze georeferenced health-related data.

These spatial data can be vector (point, line, or polygon) or raster (continuous grid) format and are often presented in quantitative thematic maps.

Disease outcomes and sociodemographic characteristics collected through surveillance systems and population censuses are frequently used as data sources in medical geography studies.