ABSTRACT
Medical geography is a young interdisciplinary field of research that involves the study of places of healing and therapeutic landscapes. This field is in fact broad and includes research fields such as the contemporary study of health geographies, disease ecology, landscape epidemiology, physiological and psychological impact of places and landscapes on human health, and the spatial quantification of health data onto world geographies. This chapter aims to relate scholarly debates around places of healing to the cultural biography of rock monuments carved or built at springs in Anatolian antiquity. Places of healing are symbolically charged locales, sites of ritual healing and pilgrimage endowed with special geological properties or a history of miraculous events, or as is usually the case a combination of both. The study of places of healing offers extremely rich avenues of thinking about places of geological significance and cultural practice through the discussions of the human body and its interactions with the mineral world.
