ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the history of nursing's contributions to and applications of health geography, which have uncovered the importance of place and space to the delivery and receipt of health-care services. Nurses' insights are often the product of their lengthy observations of and experiences in various settings expressly as practitioners, along with their empirical studies of their patients and fellow colleagues. The chapter specifically focuses on nursing because of nurses' unique perspectives and the experience of using health geography in scholarship. It describes three waves of inquiry that have characterized the intersection of nursing's scholarly endeavors with geography. In the first wave, the focus was on the environment, as identified by Nightingale, and then later in the 20th century, environment became a meta-concept in nursing theory. In the second wave, attention turned to nurses' work environments. The chapter presents the third wave, in which scholars in nursing drew on human geography directly.
