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Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground. By Tom Koch

DISEASE MAPS: Epidemics on the Ground. By Tom KocH. ix and 330 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780226449357. What more can be said about the history of disease mapping? Tom Koch answers this question with his latest work, Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground. This effort extends the author's earlier foray into this subject with Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine (2005), which emphasized the disease map as an argument for or against theories of disease causation. Disease Maps sets out to examine the historical conceptualizations of disease at every scale of "seeing" (p. 4) by peeling away the historical and philosophical layers interposed between today's digital disease maps and their pen-and-ink forebears. Koch thus reveals the evolving relationships among cartography, medicine, and disease. Koch's overarching approach is to march the reader through the centuries, bearing witness to changing disease concepts and on-the-ground cartographic representations of public health events. Beginning with the sixteenth century and moving to the near present, this progression is marked by such iconic diseases as plague, yellow fever, malaria, cholera, typhoid, polio, and cancer; wherein the reader is introduced to individuals, ideas, and paradigms salient to both the social construction of disease and disease maps. For example, Koch compellingly draws together the sixteenth-century anatomical and cartographic works of Vesalius and Ortelius as the fundamental impetus in the development of the disease map. Vesalius's anatomical atlas, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), and Ortelius's geographical atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), began a new way of seeing the internal and external worlds of the human body and geographical space. These consilient works were important as first steps in the systematization of knowledge in human anatomy, disease, and geography that ultimately led to disease mapping. Later the reader is introduced to the eighteenth-century medical luminary Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), whose revolutionary disease-classification system paved the way for associating disease symptoms with underlying physical and social environmental factors. In the mid-nineteenth century the physician William Farr (1807-1883) entered the stage, promoting the more sophisticated use of vital statistics to locate, graph, and map excess mortality. The work of Farr and his contemporaries gave rise to national-level programs and institutions concerned with the systematic collection of data on vital statistics and the development of national registries. Koch brings to light an impressive array of known and lesser-known individuals and their contributions to the discipline of disease mapping. Even though his arguments fascinate the reader, however, they do not consistently develop and link historical cartographic and scientific practices to twenty-first-century GIS and analyses of geographical patterns of disease. Koch does see the disease map as a document laden with contemporary scientific thinking, but he is selective in the choice of important natural philosophers he discusses as having been participants in the unfolding narrative. Early on, two well-known seventeenth-century philosophers are brought onto the stage. Here, Robert Boyle (1627-1691) represents laboratories and experimentation with results to be judged and validated by authoritative peers, whereas Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) represents careful observation, logic, and discernment to arrive at the truth (pp. 69-70). In other words, a dualism is created between two reasoning modes in science: deduction and induction, with the former rising to primacy in scientific thought. This distinction comes to the fore in Koch's discussion of how John Snow (1813-1858) used maps to demonstrate the waterborne nature of cholera transmission. Otherwise, the connection between these two reasoning modes and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century attempts at understanding the etiology of disease are not apparent. …