ABSTRACT
Medicine and geography: an old partnership that was almost dissolved, but one that is being forged once again to the benefit of both fields, and to the people of the larger society that both fields serve. For the driving force is to help, and the medical concern of the modern geographer ranges widely and includes people whose handicaps make it difficult for them to fit in with the swirl and bustle of modern life. It is time we took a look at these closely allied traditions of contemporary geographic research. A particularly fruitful partnership has been formed with medicine, particularly the subfield known as epidemiology the study of how diseases spread. Perhaps the most famous example in this old partnership is the work of Dr John Hill in the middle of the nineteenth century, who backed up his hunch that cholera was spread by infected water supplies by making a map of victims in a part of nineteenth-century London.
