ABSTRACT
This book explores the links between culture, place and health from our vantage point as both cultural and health geographers. These three domains of socialscientific concern have independently, and in paired combinations, been of considerable interest to anthropologists, sociologists and geographers for some time. Recently, however, the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in medical geography has contributed to the transformation of this field into a new formulation as ‘health geography’. The net result is an increasing interest in the way cultural beliefs and practices structure the sites of health experience and health care provision. Such sites are, from the geographer’s viewpoint, best regarded as places, given the rich nuances of that term which direct attention to both identity and location (Eyles 1985).
