Histories of medical geography.

Like would-be claimants arguing over a family inheritance, different disciplines have created different genealogies of medical geography, even as they share an interest in capturing its riches. Over the course of the twentieth century, historians of medicine and geographers have each created their own histories of the relations between health and environment.' Yet for both historians and geographers, medical geography has offered the tantalizing possibility for linking historical insight with the concerns of current practice. Again and again, this imperative has structured historical narratives, even as the details differ according to allegiance. The founders of the modern discipline of the history of medicine in Europe and the United States imbued the young field with a profound sense of the importance of geographic understanding. In the 1930s and 1940s, as the "polymathic Leipzig students", the German-trained cadre of Henry Sigerist, George Rosen, and Erwin Ackerknecht, along with the American Fielding H Garrison, fanned out across the American academic world, they were united not only by an energetic interest in the history of medicine, but by an enduring fascination for the relations between history,