ABSTRACT
Melinda Meade opened her seminal work “Medical Geography as Human Ecology” by noting that “health professionals frequently wonder how medical geography differs from epidemiology, or what geographers do that health planners do not. These are not idle questions,” she wrote, “for in fact most models in medical geography have come from epidemiology or from health planners” (Meade, 1977: 379). In that paper, Meade then went on to develop her “Triangle of Human Ecology,” which posits that an individual’s health status is a result of interactions among his/her biological characteristics, behaviors, and environment. Since that time, modern medical geography has evolved into a field with its own identity, as well as one that continues to maintain a close relationship with epidemiology and other health science disciplines.
