ABSTRACT
As care has moved from institutional to community-based sites of delivery, concern has focused not only on the relocation of the locus of care, but also on the new sets of actors and agencies involved with its planning and provision. The relationship between healthcare and the means through which social, cultural, political and economic influences alter the experience of health and illness across space and within places has been of particular interest to medical geographers in recent years. The range of studies and subject matter encompassed within medical geography make it both a complex and diverse sub-discipline. Geographical approaches to health have a long and respected history traceable to Ancient Greece. As a sub-discipline, the emergence of medical geography has been attributed to the German Zeiss. Ecological approaches to medical geography have been largely concerned with the influence of geography on agents or vectors of disease; the main purposes being to locate and establish geographical correlations arising from identified phenomenon.
