Nodding syndrome is a pediatric epileptic encephalopathy of apparent environmental origin that was first described in Tanzania, with recent epidemics in South Sudan and Uganda. Following a brief description of the medical geography, setting and case definition of this progressive brain disorder, we report recent advances relating to etiology, diagnosis and treatment described in papers given at...

In late eighteenthand nineteenth-century Europe, few issues stirred more public and scientific debate than those of health and environment. At the forefront of concern about science, race and medicine were questions of whether Europeans could adapt to life in tropical environments. The foregoing essays reveal a fascinating array of stories, of historically situated knowledges, each seeking audi...

The perception that some diseases happen in certain places is old. The concern in studying the relation between the human being and the environment resulted in several studies of medical geography, directed to the analysis of diseases spatial distribution. This sectional study was carried out in Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo State, and aimed to illustrate, through health problems (dengue, leprosy a...

Studies on medical geography about leprosy discuss the role of the detailed report of the occupation of the territories as a basis of the permanence of leprosy focus. In Brazil, the states that present the highest rates of detection historically are in the Amazon region, which shows an uneven regional evolution of the disease. This paper analyzes the evolution of leprosy contextualizing the mig...

The study analysed occupational diseases in the Czech Republic from the viewpoint of occupational medicine and medical geography. It used a dataset consisting of 32,646 cases of occupational diseases reported during the period of 1994-2013. The descriptive part of the study analysed occupational diseases according to their spatial distribution, occurrence in different branches of economic activ...

The contributions of Brazilian physicians to knowledge of diseases caused by parasitic worms, during the second half of the nineteenth century, had distinct effects on three epistemic communities: Brazilian clinical anatomy, French medical geography, and the emerging field of medical parasitology. Accepting the heterogeneity of both the systems for legitimizing scientific facts and the epistemo...

This paper contributes to the `new' medical geography through its analysis of the therapeutic landscapes of the Jola of The Gambia. The paper advances the debate surrounding the conceptualisation of medicine and health through a review of literature on African medicinal systems; it examines in detail the health care system of the Jola of The Gambia, documenting indigenous human and ethnoveterin...

In 1854, Dr. John Snow identified the Broad Street pump as the source of an intense cholera outbreak by plotting the location of cholera deaths on a dot-map. He had the pump handle removed and the outbreak ended...or so one version of the story goes. In medical geography, the story of Snow and the Broad Street cholera outbreak is a common example of the discipline in action. While authors in ot...