Medical Geography and Medical Climatology

Abstract

A medicine of the environment emerged on the European continent between 1690 and 1710.² The leading figures in this formative stage, Bernardino Ramazzini, Giovanni Lancisi, and Friedrich Hoffmann, drew on what they knew of British work in medicine, political arithmetic, and the natural sciences in general, and added distinctive elements of their own. This chapter will describe these assimilations and additions, and examine a loop in the road we are following. Whereas in the first phase of environmentalism — the phase of Sydenham and Arbuthnot — the identification of forces and factors deemed relevant to the environment-disease association expanded, ultimately, to the confusion of Short’s unbounded list, continental interest focused on either a medicine of places or a medicine of climates. By specialising, this interest forced the medical effort into a more thorough exploration of central propositions, and away from a mere listing of all the potentially relevant variables. Continental environmentalism sought to record specific symptoms and characteristics of the milieu and to schematise the signs and signals of the milieu about disease.

The public health is the vigour, the strength, the wealth, and the prosperity of a state.

Menuret de Ghambaud

Preventive medicine, which seeks to destroy the causes of disease or to prevent it, is without doubt the most useful medicine.¹

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