-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [ANZMapS] forthcoming book: Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:27:24 +0000
From: Brendan Whyte <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
To: AMC <[log in to unmask]>, mapsL <[log in to unmask]>,
Carto-soc <[log in to unmask]>



A forthcoming book (Chicago Uni Press, 2012) by tom Koch that will be of
interest to members and libraries.


http://kochworks.com/disease_maps.php

Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground


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.




Tom Koch has previously published "Cartographies of disease (ESRI Press,
2005).
http://esripress.esri.com/display/index.cfm?fuseaction=display&websiteID=90&moduleID=0



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