This week we learned about what is health geography. The early health geography is related to medical geography. Medical geography is the application on geographical perspectives and methods to study of health, disease and health care. It uses the concepts and techniques of the discipline of geography in investigating health-related topics. It usually studies health, disease, and health care.
The contemporary health geography builds on the foundation of the previous medical geographers, but more focus on the alternative social and environmental perspective on health in which geography can play on the important part, along with other social sciences. Then, combining the humanistic geography and contemporary health geography, the incipient “post-medical” health geography is born.
The early medical geography is a traditional perspective, which accepts disease as a naturally occurring, culture-free, and real entity. While the contemporary perspective holds an argument that the notions of health, disease and illness are problematic, and intimately linked to power relations in society.
There are five strands of 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”
- Cultural approaches to “medical geography”