Intriguing intellectual intersections offer the promise of enriching medical geography and making it both more theoretically sophisticated and more policy relevant. Employing a socio-ecological model of health, this paper explores several of these intersections, including the incorporation of...

Ciguatera, a form of fish poisoning with a pantropical distribution, has been a recognized health problem in the Carribean and the Pacific for centuries (in the decade from 1973 to 1983 for the island Pacific region as a whole, reported incidence, conservatively 20% of actual incidence, was...

Regional health systems planning implicitly incorporates information about the distance behavior of hospital patients, in specifying hospital catchment areas, service-specific catchment areas and levels of centralization. Distance behavior of patients varies depending on their particular...

Spatial analyses of disease patterns have been used by investigators as one tool with which to address problems of disease causation. However, while the results of spatial studies may be suggestive, they have been definitive only rarely. This is because there are numerous epistemological,...

Emerging infectious diseases are the focus of increased attention and even alarm in the scholarly and popular literature. The emergence of new diseases and the resurgence of older and previously recognized infectious diseases both in developing and developed country poses challenges for...

This is a case-control study of rural hospitals which closed between 1970 and 1980. Nonmetropolitan hospitals which closed were matched with a comparable set of hospitals which remained open, yielding 148 closures (cases) and 310 controls. Univariate and multivariate analyses indicate that...

Most studies of disease distribution, in medical geography and other related disciplines, have been empirical in nature and rooted in the assumptions of logical positivism. However, some of the more newly articulated philosophies of the social sciences, and of social theory, have much to add in...

The American health care system is confronting a crisis: one consisting of severe problems of cost and access, and the other consisting of significant qualitative changes in structure, systemic behavior and operation. Some of these factors may be understood better in comparison with how systems...

Residential segregation is a common aspect of the urban experiences of African-Americans in the United States (US), yet few studies have considered how segregation might influence perinatal health. Here, we develop a conceptual model of relationships between segregation and birth outcomes and...