Humboldtian representations in medical cartography.

In the course of the nineteenth century, medical thinking took a significant spatial turn. This manifested itself in, among other things, the development of medical cartography. The geographic location, the contours of distribution and the connections with the physical environment of particular diseases were for the first time indicated on maps. On the basis of such cartographic visualizations, etiological hypotheses were formulated. Maps suggestively connected the causes of diseases with their geographic occurrence, and gave considerable weight to views of environmental determinism in thinking about health and disease. The history of medical cartography has received little attention in the secondary literature. Historians of cartography have tended to ignore it,' and so have historians of medicine, with very few exceptions. Among these exceptions was H J Jusatz, who in 1939 published an article on the development of medical cartography in Germany.2 In 1958, E W Gilbert published a study of early medical maps in England, focusing on cholera maps of towns and also on August Petermann's pioneering cholera map of the British Isles.3 More recently, Gilles Palsky has discussed the early phase of medical cartography,4 which nearly coincides with the early period of medical geography in general, reckoned to have begun with the Versuch einer allgemeinen medicinisch-praktischen Geographie (vol. 1, 1792; vol. 2, 1795) by the German physician Leonhard Ludwig Finke. In this chapter, our main concern is to look at representational techniques and conventions and trace their development from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. More particularly, we are interested