Introduction

Abstract

One need only look in any newspaper and observe the flourishing market in promises of good health through diets or ways of inhabiting the earth to find evidence that the “configurationist model,” suggested by Charles Rosenberg in 1992 to characterize one archetypal response to explain epidemics in the history of the West, is still very much alive. For Rosenberg, in the long history of attempts to explain epidemic diseases, two fundamental approaches existed and often coexisted in the West: contamination and configuration. While the former, reductionist and monocausal, consisted in the “idea of person-to-person contagion, of the transmission of some morbid material from one individual to another,” the latter implies “a vision of health as a balanced, integrated, and value-imparting relationship between humankind and its environment.” From the eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, configurationist arguments, refined notably in miasma theory, clearly dominated medical and nonmedical thinking in Europe and North America. For the adherents of this theory, epidemic diseases could be caused by a very wide range of environmental factors: topography, air, water, food, miasmas, or garbage. By the end of the nineteenth century, this approach, which focused more on factors from the social environment, like urbanization, working conditions, and poor education, was undermined by germ theory, which directed medical opinion toward contamination in “its modern, laboratory-oriented guise.” However, as Rosenberg states, “an interest in environmental determinants of health and disease remained alive and in continued dialogue with the new bacteriological etiology.” The contributions in this volume dealing with views on health, the natural environment, and disease in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe confirm this last statement. We argue that, in present times, the notion of “exposome,” coined by Christopher Paul Wild (complementing the “genome”) and defined as a person’s global exposure to the environmental factors potentially altering health and leading to our modern epidemics of chronic diseases, relates to this long history of Western medical thinking that focuses on the role of the environment to account for health and disease. Taking this long run of history into account, this books addresses the issue of how humankind has observed, imagined, and conceptualized the links between the environment and health in a broad geographical framework.

“Climate Change Is Bad for Your Health”, New York Times, Oct. 30, 2017

“Environnement : les enfants naissent pré-pollués”, Le Monde, 2 octobre 2015

“家里养这10种花, 身体越来越健康”

(Growing these 10 types of flowers in your home will improve your health), 人民日报 2017-08-17