Disease Maps: Epidemics on the GroundDisease, Maps, Epidemics

New Republic Review
Haggett Review
CMAJ Published Review

From the start, Cartographies of Disease was that rarest of publications: an authoratative and instant classic. Since 2005 it has been widely cited in not only cartography and medical geography but also in epidemiology and public health. As a teaching text it has been used by instructors in a variety of fields, including medicine and nursing. The text balanced an historical perspective with a consideration of the manner in which mapping “profiles” diseases and their environmental constituents. From this perspective, mapping is and always has been the handmaiden of statistical approaches, bureaucratic necessities, and clinical concerns.

In this new, expanded edition the original text is updated and expanded to include a decade’s research and concerns. This includes two new chapters on the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic in West Africa are included. That focus permits a discussion of new technologies in disease analysis and modeling that adds to what has been, from the start, a text that is at once contemporary and historical, practical and theoretical.

bookcover

Ethics in Everyday Places

In Ethics in Everyday Places, ethicist and geographer Tom Koch considers what happens when, as he puts it, “you do everything right but know you've done something wrong." The resulting moral stress and injury, he argues, are pervasive in modern Western society. Koch makes his argument "from the ground up," from the perspective of average persons, and through a revealing series of maps in which issues of ethics and morality are embedded.

Read More

WICN Interview

CKNW Interview

 bookcover

In Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (University of Chicago Press, 2011) medical geographer Tom Koch makes a new, and important argument: It is in the mapping of individual cases of illness as group events that we have come to understand disease as a public thing affecting general populations. Maps become, in this telling, the workbench on which a collection of individual cases are combined to create a single health event, seen in place. It is thus in the mapping, and the environmental thinking that mapping promotes, that theories about this or that disease (and health in general) are first formulated and then tested.

New Republic Review

Haggett Review

CMAJ Published Review

Go To Tom Koch's Artist Page

© TOM KOCH 2010. All Rights Reserved. Trademarks are property of their respective owners. Site maintained by: SilverServers Inc.