Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground By Tom Koch In this detail
from a 1903 map of cancer in a village D'Arcy Powell
investigated possible local environmental causes of cancer
incidence in his British medical practice. Something wonderful
happened in the 1500′s when we learned to see in a way that
permitted knowledge to be accumulated and categorized in a new
way. It began with an anatomical atlas and an atlas of the
world, the two together presaging a way of knowing that
continues today. Within a hundred years the map became the
medium in which symptoms were collected into databases whose
cases became a single mapped event: an outbreak of plague, for
example, whose sources could be interrogated. By the end of the
next century the map became a principal medium in which theories
of diseases like yellow fever were proposed and then tested in
maps of local outbreaks. Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground,
tells the story of disease from the perspective of maps in which
local outbreaks, national epidemics, and i