Geographies of Health Series – serie

How children experience, negotiate and connect with or resist their surroundings impacts on their health and wellbeing. In cities, various aspects of the physical and social environment can affect children’s wellbeing. This edited collection brings together different accounts and experiences of children’s health and wellbeing in urban environments from majority and minority world perspectives. Privileging children’s expertise, this timely volume explicitly explores the relationships between health, wellbeing and place. To demonstrate the importance of a place-based understanding of urban children’s health and wellbeing, the authors unpack the meanings of the physical, social and symbolic environments that constrain or enable children’s flourishing in urban environments. Drawing on the expertise of geographers, educationists, anthropologists, psychologists, planners and public health researchers, as well as nurses and social workers, this book, above all, sees children as the experts on their experiences of the issues that affect their wellbeing.Children’s Health and Wellbeing in Urban Environments will be fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in cultural geography, urban geography, environmental geography, children’s health, youth studies or urban planning.

This thoughtful book offers unique insights on global health research, drawing attention to the equity choices embedded in day-to-day patterns and assumptions that shape how people do, think about, and navigate research.It invites readers to position equity as the driving principle and purpose of this field and presents a plethora of examples that demonstrate how to navigate the complex work of centring equity in research. This book provides foundational content on the standards of guiding equity considerations in global health, with chapters adopting cross-disciplinary methods of engaging in equity thinking and doing. Chapters explore applications of six distinct elements of the CCGHR Principles for Global Health Research, including partnering authentically, embracing inclusion, sharing benefits, committing to the future, acting on causes of inequities and practicing humility. Each chapter is accompanied with engaging reflection questions.This book is a pivotal resource for those who perform, use or support global equity health research. It will appeal to students, researchers, policy makers, professionals and funders, as well as those with an interest in and commitment to centring equity in their approaches to doing, using, or supporting health research.

The closure of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015 prompted the need for a book of this kind. An interdisciplinary group of global health scholars contribute to the understanding of the emerging and fast-growing problem of the dual burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in Africa. This book is timely, as the international community has moved from the MDGs to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the blueprint for a new human development agenda. Contributions and case studies are situated in the revised Epidemiologic and Nutrition Transition Model to capture the current situation, referencing communicable and NCDs on the African continent. The case studies encapsulated aim to help minimize negative health outcomes and improve population health, well-being, and equity in the future.This book will be significant in policy circles to assist international organizations, governments, and United Nations agencies. It aims to chart the future for health in Africa in light of recently adopted SDGs. This book is also a useful complementary reader for global public health related courses.

Geographies of Plague Pandemics synthesizes our current understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of plague, Yersinia pestis. The environmental, political, economic, and social impacts of the plague from Ancient Greece to the modern day are examined. Chapters explore the identity of plague DNA, its human mortality, and the source of ancient and modern plagues. This book also discusses the role plague has played in shifting power from Mediterranean Europe to north-western Europe during the 500 years that plague has raged across the continent. The book demonstrates how recent colonial structures influenced the spread and mortality of plague while changing colonial histories. In addition, this book provides critical insight into how plague has shaped modern medicine, public health, and disease monitoring, and what role, if any, it might play as a terror weapon.The scope and breadth of Geographies of Plague Pandemics offers geographers, historians, biologists, and public health educators the opportunity to explore the deep connections among disease and human existence.

Non-representational theory is an academic approach that animates the active world; its taking-place. It shows how material, sensory and affective processes combine with conscious thought and agency in the making of everyday life. This book offers an agenda for health geography, providing the first comprehensive overview of what a ‘more-than-representational’ health geography looks like. It outlines the basis of a new ontological understanding of health, and explores the key qualities of ‘movement-space’ that are critical to how health emerges within the assemblages that enable it. It shows how non-representational events and concerns are key to human happiness and wellbeing, to the experience of health and disease, to activities that add to or detract from health and to health care work, not to mention to the broader initiatives and operation of health institutions and health sciences. This book bridges the gap between non-representational theory and health research, and provides the groundwork for future developments in the field. It will be of interest to students, researchers and professionals alike working in health, geography and a range of other disciplines.

Health geography makes critical contributions to contemporary and emerging interdisciplinary agendas of nature-based health and health-enabling places. Couched in theory and critical empirical work on nature and health, this book addresses questions on the relationships between water, health and wellbeing. Water and blue space is a key focus in current health geography research and a new hydrophilic turn has emerged with a particular focus on the aspects of water which are affective, life-enhancing and health-enabling. Research considers the benefits and risks associated with blue space, from access to safe and clean water in the Global South, to health promoting spaces found around urban waters, to the deeper implications of climate change for water-based livelihoods and indigenous cultures. This book reflects recent theoretical debates within health geography, drawing from research in the public health, anthropology and psychology sectors. Broad thematic sections focus on interdisciplinary, experiential and equity-based elements of blue space, with individual chapters that consider indigenous and global health, water’s healing properties, leisure and blue yogic culture, coastal landscapes, surfing, swimming and sailing, along with more contested hydrophobic dimensions.The interdisciplinary lens means this book will be extremely valuable to human geographers and cultural geographers. It will also appeal to practitioners and researchers interested in environmental health, leisure and tourism, health inequalities and public health more broadly.

Much of the scientific work on environmental health research has come from the clinical and biophysical sciences. Yet contributions are being made from the social sciences with respect to economic change, distributional equities, political will, public perceptions and the social geographical challenges of the human health-environments linkages. Offering the first comprehensive and cohesive summary of the input from social science to this field, this book focuses on how humans theorize their relationships to the environment with respect to health and how these ideas are mediated through an evaluation of risk and hazards. Most work on risk has focused primarily on environmental problems. This book extends and synthesizes these works for the field of human health, treating social, economic, cultural and political context as vital. Bringing disparate literatures from across several disciplines together with their own applied research and experience, John Eyles and Jamie Baxter deal with scientific uncertainty in the everyday issues raised and question how social theories and models of the way the world works can contribute to understanding these uncertainties. This book is essential reading for those studying and researching in the fields of health geography and environmental studies as well as environmental sociology, social and applied anthropology, environmental psychology and environmental politics.

Health geographers are increasingly turning to a diverse range of interpretative methodologies to explore the complexities of health, illness, space and place to gain more comprehensive understandings of well-being and broader social models of health and health care. Drawing upon postmodernism, many health geographers are concerned with issues of representation, the body and health care policy. Also related to an emphasis on the body is the growing literature in feminist health geography that investigates the metaphorical, physical and emotional challenges of the body and disease. Reflecting these interests, the chapters in this book set out the host of creative qualitative methods being used to explore the psychosocial experiences of individuals more directly, using such traditional methods as in-depth interviews and group discussions, participant observation, diaries and discourse analysis, but also more novel techniques such as 'go-along interviews’, reflexive writing, illustrations, and photographic techniques. There are several areas of qualitative research unique to geographers which figure prominently in this volume including: health and place, comparative case study analysis, and qualitative approaches to the use of geographic information systems (GIS). This collection brings together a wide range of empirical concerns related to questions of health and shines a light on the diversity of qualitative methods in practice. Illustrating how qualitative methodologies are used in diverse health contexts this book fills an important niche for health geographers but will have wide appeal to health and geographic researchers.

Health geographers are well situated for undertaking population health intervention research (PHIR), and have an opportunity to be at the forefront of this emerging area of inquiry. However, in order to advance PHIR, the scientific community needs to be innovative with its methodologies, theories, and ability to think critically about population health issues. For example, using alternatives (e.g. community-based participatory research) to traditional study designs such as the randomised control trial, health geographers can contribute in important ways to understanding the complex relationships between population health (both intended and unintended consequences), interventions and place. Representing a diverse array of health concerns ranging across chronic and infectious diseases, and research employing varied qualitative and quantitative methodologies, the contributions to this book illustrate how geographic concepts and approaches have informed the design and planning of intervention(s) and/or the evaluation of health impacts. For example, the authors argue that geographically targeting interventions to places of high-need and tailoring interventions to local place contexts are critically important for intervention success. Including an afterword by Professor Louise Potvin, this book will appeal to researchers interested in population and public/community health and epidemiology as well as health geography.

Although health equity and diversity-focussed research has begun to gain momentum, there is still a paucity of research from health geographers that explicitly explores how geographic factors, such as place, space, scale, community, and location, inform multiple axes of difference. Such axes can include residential location, age, sex, gender, race/ethnicity, culture, religion, socio-economic status, marital status, sexual orientation, education level, and immigration status. Specifically focussing on Canada’s rapidly changing society, which is becoming increasingly pluralized and diverse, this book examines the place-health-diversity intersection in this national context. Health geographers are well positioned to offer a valuable contribution to diversity-focussed research because place is inextricably linked to differential experiences of health. For example, access to health care and health promoting services and resources is largely influenced by where one is physically and socially situated within the web of diversity. Furthermore, applying geographic concepts like place, in both the physical and social sense, allows researchers to explore multiple axes of difference simultaneously. Such geographic perspectives, as presented in this book, offer new insights into what makes diverse people, in diverse places, with access to diverse resources (un)healthy in different ways in Canada and beyond.

The last 40 years has seen a significant shift from state commitment to asylum-based mental health care to a mixed economy of care in a variety of locations. In the wake of this deinstitutionalisation, attention to date has focussed on users and providers of care. The consequences for the idea and fabric of the psychiatric asylum have remained 'stones unturned'. This book address an enduring yet under-examined question: what has become of the asylum? Focussing on the 'recycling' of both the idea of the psychiatric asylum and its sites, buildings and landscapes, this book makes theoretical connections to current trends in mental health care and to ideas in cultural/urban geography. The process of closing asylums and how asylums have survived in specific contexts and markets is assessed and consideration given to the enduring attraction of asylum and its repackaging as well as to retained mental health uses on former asylum sites, new uses on former sites, and interpretations of the derelict psychiatric asylum. The key questions examined are the challenges posed in seeking new uses for former asylums, the extent to which re-use can transcend stigma yet sustain memory and how location is critical in shaping the future of asylum and asylum sites.

With a global commitment to achieve gender equality by 2030, the SDGs present a historic opportunity to place gender as central to human progress across the globe. Gender equality, which requires the empowerment of all women and girls, is an explicit goal, in addition to being a fundamental prerequisite to and facilitator of most other SDGs. This edited collection provides a range of geographical and geospatial insights, from a variety of disciplinary and country-specific perspectives, to better understand gender and sustainable development. In addition to several African countries, Mexico, Japan, Canada, USA, and Cambodia are featured. A range of topical case studies examine women’s domestic and care work, including water collection, breastfeeding, food purchasing, and caring for elderly family members. Access to health care services is examined in the case of breast screening and antenatal care. Women’s engagement in the labour force is also addressed, with a specific look at the renewable energy sector; structural barriers to employment are discussed across a number of chapters, with clear strategies to break through these barriers. Finally, theoretical insights are proposed in better understanding and engaging in gendered inequalities in health.

With a global commitment to achieve gender equality by 2030, the SDGs present a historic opportunity to place gender as central to human progress across the globe. Gender equality, which requires the empowerment of all women and girls, is an explicit goal, in addition to being a fundamental prerequisite to and facilitator of most other SDGs. This edited collection provides a range of geographical and geospatial insights, from a variety of disciplinary and country-specific perspectives, to better understand gender and sustainable development. In addition to several African countries, Mexico, Japan, Canada, USA, and Cambodia are featured. A range of topical case studies examine women’s domestic and care work, including water collection, breastfeeding, food purchasing, and caring for elderly family members. Access to health care services is examined in the case of breast screening and antenatal care. Women’s engagement in the labour force is also addressed, with a specific look at the renewable energy sector; structural barriers to employment are discussed across a number of chapters, with clear strategies to break through these barriers. Finally, theoretical insights are proposed in better understanding and engaging in gendered inequalities in health.

The therapeutic landscape concept, first introduced early in the 1990s, has been widely employed in health/medical geography and gaining momentum in various health-related disciplines. This is the first book published in several years, and provides an introduction to the concept and its applications. Written by health/medical geographers and anthropologists, it addresses contemporary applications in the natural and built environments; for special populations, such as substance abusers; and in health care sites, a new and evolving area - and provides an array of critiques or contestations of the concept and its various applications. The conclusion of the work provides a critical evaluation of the development and progress of the concept to date, signposting the likely avenues for future investigation.

Health care is constantly undergoing change and refinement resulting from the adoption of new practices and technologies, the changing nature of societies and populations, and also shifts in the very places from which care is delivered. Primary Health Care: People, Practice, Place draws together significant contributions from established experts across a variety of disciplines to focus on such changes in primary health care, not only because it is the most basic and integral form of health service delivery, but also because it is an area to which geographers have made significant contributions and to which other scholars have engaged in 'thinking geographically' about its core concepts and issues. Including perspectives from both consumers and producers, it moves beyond geographical accounts of the context of health service provision through its explicit focus on the practice of primary health care. With arguments well-supported by empirical research, this book will appeal not only to scholars across a range of social and health sciences, but also to professionals involved in health services.

A significant body of theoretical and empirical studies describes 'sense of place' as an outcome of interconnected psychological, social and environmental processes in relation to physical place(s). Sense of place has been examined, particularly in human geography, in terms of both the character intrinsic to a place as a localized, bounded and material entity, and the sentiments of attachment/detachment that humans experience and express in relation to specific places. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines are increasingly exploring the relationship between place and health, and recently, the field of public health has been encouraged to recognize sense of place as a potential contributing factor to well-being. It is evident that over the last few decades, sense of place has developed into a versatile construct. This important book brings together work related to sense of place and health, broadly defined, from the perspective of a variety of fields and disciplines. It will give the reader an understanding of both the range of applications of this construct within approaches to human health as well as the breadth of research methodologies employed in its investigation.

Health geography makes critical contributions to contemporary and emerging interdisciplinary agendas of nature-based health and health-enabling places. Couched in theory and critical empirical work on nature and health, this book addresses questions on the relationships between water, health and wellbeing. Water and blue space is a key focus in current health geography research and a new hydrophilic turn has emerged with a particular focus on the aspects of water which are affective, life-enhancing and health-enabling. Research considers the benefits and risks associated with blue space, from access to safe and clean water in the Global South, to health promoting spaces found around urban waters, to the deeper implications of climate change for water-based livelihoods and indigenous cultures. This book reflects recent theoretical debates within health geography, drawing from research in the public health, anthropology and psychology sectors. Broad thematic sections focus on interdisciplinary, experiential and equity-based elements of blue space, with individual chapters that consider indigenous and global health, water’s healing properties, leisure and blue yogic culture, coastal landscapes, surfing, swimming and sailing, along with more contested hydrophobic dimensions.The interdisciplinary lens means this book will be extremely valuable to human geographers and cultural geographers. It will also appeal to practitioners and researchers interested in environmental health, leisure and tourism, health inequalities and public health more broadly.

Anxious Geographies offers a unique perspective on social anxiety, framing it as both a social and spatial phenomenon. Through a meticulous exploration using online questionnaires and interviews, the book provides a crucial examination of the intricacies of anxious lives.This book presents a critical intervention in the experience of mental health in 21st-century society and provides a compelling geographical account of the underpinnings of the anxious experience. The book pivots on the in-depth perspectives of people with social anxiety, diagnosed or “sub-clinical”, but with an academic commentary that relates their experience to the medicalisation of a disrupted relational life, offering lessons for all of us in modern societies. Each chapter considers a unique aspect of social anxiety accounting for the social, spatial, temporal, relational and embodied dynamics, a geographical approach that enriches our understanding of the contexts and conditions that exacerbate and sustain anxious distress. The phenomenological descriptions herein, capture how social anxiety can profoundly alter a person’s coherent, habitual and embodied sense of being in and navigating through their social and spatial worlds. Through the experiential accounts of anxious distress and by considering the social contexts in which they emerge, this book provides readers with crucial insights into the hidden lives of those living with social anxiety.This book will be of appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of human geography and across the social sciences and humanities. It will also provide useful insights for academics and health professionals in social psychiatry, social psychology, counselling studies and therapeutic practice.

Anxious Geographies offers a unique perspective on social anxiety, framing it as both a social and spatial phenomenon. Through a meticulous exploration using online questionnaires and interviews, the book provides a crucial examination of the intricacies of anxious lives.This book presents a critical intervention in the experience of mental health in 21st-century society and provides a compelling geographical account of the underpinnings of the anxious experience. The book pivots on the in-depth perspectives of people with social anxiety, diagnosed or “sub-clinical”, but with an academic commentary that relates their experience to the medicalisation of a disrupted relational life, offering lessons for all of us in modern societies. Each chapter considers a unique aspect of social anxiety accounting for the social, spatial, temporal, relational and embodied dynamics, a geographical approach that enriches our understanding of the contexts and conditions that exacerbate and sustain anxious distress. The phenomenological descriptions herein, capture how social anxiety can profoundly alter a person’s coherent, habitual and embodied sense of being in and navigating through their social and spatial worlds. Through the experiential accounts of anxious distress and by considering the social contexts in which they emerge, this book provides readers with crucial insights into the hidden lives of those living with social anxiety.This book will be of appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of human geography and across the social sciences and humanities. It will also provide useful insights for academics and health professionals in social psychiatry, social psychology, counselling studies and therapeutic practice.

Reimagining the garden as a vital metaphysical framework for understanding the intricate relationships between health, well-being, and the environment, the book proposes a holistic, ecologically sensitive model that integrates mind, body, nature, and community.The text offers the reader a transformative perspective that, transcending traditional dualisms, embraces the atmospheric sense of deep interconnectedness between individuals, communities, and the natural world. Through a blend of philosophical analysis, autoethnographic narratives, and cultural reflections, the authors, proposing a transgressive metaphysical model for personal and communal engagement with the processes of life, revise the idea of health as “lack of illness,” redefining it as “flourishing.” Such garden-inspired metaphysics promotes a dynamic, inclusive understanding of health, balancing modern medical approaches with a profound attunement to the rhythms of nature.Atmospheric Health, Nature, and Well-being is an ideal resource for scholars, students, and other professionals in philosophy, environmental studies, health sciences, and cultural studies, as well as policymakers, urban planners, and anyone interested in innovative approaches to health, well-being, and the environment.

Cultivated Therapeutic Landscapes provides an in-depth and critical exploration of the impact of gardens and gardening on health and wellbeing. In this book we explore the ways in which gardens and gardening prevent illness and restore wellbeing, and how they improve social and health equity via tradi-tional and innovative mechanisms and across a range of sites.Therapeutic landscapes are relational, reciprocal, and evolving. In this book, leading scholars from across the globe demonstrate how therapeutic landscapes research and practice is expanded through and around the processes of cultivation. Deliberately interdisciplinary, the book explores how tending and caring for green spaces, collectively and individually, works to prevent and restore health and wellbeing, as well as impact upstream factors determining social justice and equity. A unique combination of academics, clinicians, and practitioners deliver theoretical and practical insights into wide-ranging health-enabling factors, based on new evidence and autoethnographic experiences in home gardens, school, and community gardens, clinical settings, public green spaces, and sites of conservation and wildness. This book pushes concepts of cultivation and horticulture into underexplored spatial, ontological, and wellbeing territories. Despite long-term practical interest, thera-peutic horticulture is only now establishing a strong theoretical and research foundation.This book provides much-needed critical insights into the impact on the key drivers of health, wellbeing, and social equity, with a focus on practical skills for utilising horticulture or designing for particular health needs. It will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in the areas of health geography; cultural geography; cultural studies; therapeutic horticulture; environmental studies; community development and planning; landscape architecture; social work; health studies; and health policy.

Cultivated Therapeutic Landscapes provides an in-depth and critical exploration of the impact of gardens and gardening on health and wellbeing. In this book we explore the ways in which gardens and gardening prevent illness and restore wellbeing, and how they improve social and health equity via tradi-tional and innovative mechanisms and across a range of sites.Therapeutic landscapes are relational, reciprocal, and evolving. In this book, leading scholars from across the globe demonstrate how therapeutic landscapes research and practice is expanded through and around the processes of cultivation. Deliberately interdisciplinary, the book explores how tending and caring for green spaces, collectively and individually, works to prevent and restore health and wellbeing, as well as impact upstream factors determining social justice and equity. A unique combination of academics, clinicians, and practitioners deliver theoretical and practical insights into wide-ranging health-enabling factors, based on new evidence and autoethnographic experiences in home gardens, school, and community gardens, clinical settings, public green spaces, and sites of conservation and wildness. This book pushes concepts of cultivation and horticulture into underexplored spatial, ontological, and wellbeing territories. Despite long-term practical interest, thera-peutic horticulture is only now establishing a strong theoretical and research foundation.This book provides much-needed critical insights into the impact on the key drivers of health, wellbeing, and social equity, with a focus on practical skills for utilising horticulture or designing for particular health needs. It will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in the areas of health geography; cultural geography; cultural studies; therapeutic horticulture; environmental studies; community development and planning; landscape architecture; social work; health studies; and health policy.

This book provides a comprehensive insight into health disparities in both the United States and China. It offers valuable perspectives on public health and policy through an examination of the spatial, social, and environmental dimensions of health disparities.Through comparative analysis of two distinct healthcare systems, economic conditions, and cultural contexts, the book offers a thorough assessment of how policies and social structures influence public health outcomes. It examines factors such as socioeconomic status, social capital, community, social and physical environments, healthcare systems, and health policies. The book adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on key theoretical frameworks such as socio-ecological model, social determinants of health (SDOH), and social capital theory. It integrates geospatial, statistical, and survey analyses and includes a series of case studies to explore health disparities.This book will be of interest to students and researchers in medical geography, medical sociology, and public health, as well as professionals and policy makers who address spatial, social, and environmental disparities.

This thoughtful book offers unique insights on global health research, drawing attention to the equity choices embedded in day-to-day patterns and assumptions that shape how people do, think about, and navigate research.It invites readers to position equity as the driving principle and purpose of this field and presents a plethora of examples that demonstrate how to navigate the complex work of centring equity in research. This book provides foundational content on the standards of guiding equity considerations in global health, with chapters adopting cross-disciplinary methods of engaging in equity thinking and doing. Chapters explore applications of six distinct elements of the CCGHR Principles for Global Health Research, including partnering authentically, embracing inclusion, sharing benefits, committing to the future, acting on causes of inequities and practicing humility. Each chapter is accompanied with engaging reflection questions.This book is a pivotal resource for those who perform, use or support global equity health research. It will appeal to students, researchers, policy makers, professionals and funders, as well as those with an interest in and commitment to centring equity in their approaches to doing, using, or supporting health research.

This book explores the profound impacts of gentrification on public health, examining how this process reshapes socioeconomic and physical environments, exacerbates health disparities, and influences lived experiences. It does so through diverse theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives provided by leading researchers from around the globe.This book provides a comprehensive understanding of the intersections between gentrification and health, with multidisciplinary perspectives and international case studies. It explores key concepts, addresses methodological challenges, and introduces innovative analytical approaches to disentangle the complex pathways linking gentrification to health. With contributions from leading experts, this book synthesises current evidence and provides scholars, policymakers, and practitioners with the knowledge needed to design rigorous studies and implement evidence-based interventions that mitigate health risks, build resilience, and foster equity in rapidly evolving territories.This book is designed for researchers across social and health sciences, undergraduate and graduate students, as well as policymakers, urban planners, and public health professionals interested in understanding and addressing the health impacts of gentrification.

This book examines global health as a foreign policy issue in Germany, exploring its entanglement with security and economic concerns. Based on an ethnography at the German Federal Foreign Office (FFO) during Covid-19, it explores the emergence of this policy field, its variations in the pandemic moment, and the coordination of vaccine donations as a case study.With global health as a growing concern for governments’ security and foreign policies and a corresponding academic interest in these developments, this book offers detailed insights into the German context. Germany has been denoted a latecomer but increasingly important actor in global health – and this book focuses on the assemblage of global health and foreign policy in this setting. The unique observation of Covid-19 in the German FFO highlights the crisis as exceptional and non-exceptional at the same time, making visible gaps in global health structures more generally. The vaccine donations during Covid-19 illustrate problematizations and technologies of global health as entangled with security and economic concerns.For anyone interested in global health, both in academia and “in the field”, this book provides insights into governmental cooperation in the area of global health and foreign policy prior to and during a crisis, and allows for conclusions for further developments and/or future crisis moments.

Geographies of Plague Pandemics synthesizes our current understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of plague, Yersinia pestis. The environmental, political, economic, and social impacts of the plague from Ancient Greece to the modern day are examined. Chapters explore the identity of plague DNA, its human mortality, and the source of ancient and modern plagues. This book also discusses the role plague has played in shifting power from Mediterranean Europe to north-western Europe during the 500 years that plague has raged across the continent. The book demonstrates how recent colonial structures influenced the spread and mortality of plague while changing colonial histories. In addition, this book provides critical insight into how plague has shaped modern medicine, public health, and disease monitoring, and what role, if any, it might play as a terror weapon.The scope and breadth of Geographies of Plague Pandemics offers geographers, historians, biologists, and public health educators the opportunity to explore the deep connections among disease and human existence.

Health care is constantly undergoing change and refinement resulting from the adoption of new practices and technologies, the changing nature of societies and populations, and also shifts in the very places from which care is delivered. Primary Health Care: People, Practice, Place draws together significant contributions from established experts across a variety of disciplines to focus on such changes in primary health care, not only because it is the most basic and integral form of health service delivery, but also because it is an area to which geographers have made significant contributions and to which other scholars have engaged in 'thinking geographically' about its core concepts and issues. Including perspectives from both consumers and producers, it moves beyond geographical accounts of the context of health service provision through its explicit focus on the practice of primary health care. With arguments well-supported by empirical research, this book will appeal not only to scholars across a range of social and health sciences, but also to professionals involved in health services.

A significant body of theoretical and empirical studies describes 'sense of place' as an outcome of interconnected psychological, social and environmental processes in relation to physical place(s). Sense of place has been examined, particularly in human geography, in terms of both the character intrinsic to a place as a localized, bounded and material entity, and the sentiments of attachment/detachment that humans experience and express in relation to specific places. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines are increasingly exploring the relationship between place and health, and recently, the field of public health has been encouraged to recognize sense of place as a potential contributing factor to well-being. It is evident that over the last few decades, sense of place has developed into a versatile construct. This important book brings together work related to sense of place and health, broadly defined, from the perspective of a variety of fields and disciplines. It will give the reader an understanding of both the range of applications of this construct within approaches to human health as well as the breadth of research methodologies employed in its investigation.