The health of individuals is intrinsically linked to where they live by a series of factors: such as the food they eat, the viral strains to which they are exposed, and the atmospheric conditions in which they live. This lecture talks about the differences between medical and health geography.

Medical geography preceded health geography and is important to understand to grasp the broader concept of health geography. Medical geography utilized GIS knowledge to map the biological and ecological determinants of diseases. It is holistic in the way it views its subjects. This perhaps is one of the main differences between medical and health geographies. Health geography includes the biomedical aspects, but does not end there, as it encompasses social and environmental influences on the development and distribution of health-related issues.

Medical geography is the more “traditional” way of examining diseases, where they are believed to occur regardless of the socio-economic or political factors. Health geography or “contemporary” medical geography considers the humanistic factors associated with health-related spatially distributed phenomenon.

There are five strands to health geography: spatial patterning of disease and health, spatial patterning of service provision, humanistic approaches to “medical geography”, structuralist/materialist/critical approaches to “medical geography” and cultural approaches to “medical geography”. It is also divided into two stream, one of which focuses on epidemiology and the other on health services provision.