Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground
Disease, Maps, Epidemics
In Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (University of Chicago Press, 2012) 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.
This is not something new, but rather something old that has become increasingly important as immigration and trade carried disease around the world. Our understanding of disease as a public thing began in the 1500's with an anatomical atlas and an atlas of the world, the two together presaging a way of knowing that continues today. From this start maps became the medium in which symptoms were collected into databases whose cases became a single event: an outbreak of plague in the seventeenth century, for example. By the end of the eighteenth century the map was become a principal medium in which theories of diseases like cancer, cholera, typhoid fever, and so on were proposed and then tested in maps of local outbreaks.
Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground, tells this story of disease through a collection of maps in which local outbreaks, national epidemics, and international pandemics were formulated. From seventeenth century plague to twenty-first century cancer: all present disease as a communal thing, something lodged in the environment and presented in a way that insisted on theorizing and testing as a way of understanding. Here, too, are the origins of health and disease not merely as private calamities but as public health events to which the response must be public and official, not simply personal.