Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground
By Tom Koch
3/5
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About this ebook
In the seventeenth century, a map of the plague suggested a radical idea—that the disease was carried and spread by humans. In the nineteenth century, maps of cholera cases were used to prove its waterborne nature. More recently, maps charting the swine flu pandemic caused worldwide panic and sent shockwaves through the medical community. In Disease Maps, Tom Koch contends that to understand epidemics and their history we need to think about maps of varying scale, from the individual body to shared symptoms evidenced across cities, nations, and the world.
Disease Maps begins with a brief review of epidemic mapping today and a detailed example of its power. Koch then traces the early history of medical cartography, including pandemics such as European plague and yellow fever, and the advancements in anatomy, printing, and world atlases that paved the way for their mapping. Moving on to the scourge of the nineteenth century—cholera—Koch considers the many choleras argued into existence by the maps of the day, including a new perspective on John Snow’s science and legacy. Finally, Koch addresses contemporary outbreaks such as AIDS, cancer, and H1N1, and reaches into the future, toward the coming epidemics. Ultimately, Disease Maps redefines conventional medical history with new surgical precision, revealing that only in maps do patterns emerge that allow disease theories to be proposed, hypotheses tested, and treatments advanced.
Tom Koch
Dr. Tom Koch is a clinical ethicist and gerontologist based in Canada. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, where he developed a series of teaching labs for medical geography. In 2005, he and coauthor, Kenneth Denike, were honored with an award for their paper on teaching medical geography through an analysis of John Snow's 1855 map of cholera in the Broad Street area of London.
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Reviews for Disease Maps
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5One would expect a book entitled Disease Maps would be a book full of maps with appropriate commentary. Instead this is a book full of commentary about maps, some of which are illustrated. Many maps are described but not illustrated.Unfortunately, most of the maps included are far too small to read, even with a magnifying glass. Some enlarged inserts are included, but one insert asking the reader to compare Copenhagen and London with German cities shows only the German cities.There are also numerous typos such as "1855 to 1805" (should be "1755 to 1805") and one map of India is captioned as being of England.This book should have been a much larger format, in order to reproduce the maps at a better scale, and should have included all the maps described.I am a lover of maps, not diseases, and so am very disappointed in this volume.