Medicalizing Topography: The French Army and Mediterranean Climates, 1760

Medicalizing Topography: The French Army and Mediterranean Climates, 1760–1860

Published:2024-05-01 Issue:1 Volume:41 Page:37-66
ISSN:0823-2105
Container-title:Canadian Journal of Health History
language:en
Short-container-title:Canadian Journal of Health History

Author:

Goff Benjamen¹

Affiliation:

1. University of Saskatchewan

Abstract

This article details how the French army employed medical topography as a tool of military occupation throughout the Mediterranean world from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. It departs from other works by focusing exclusively on medical topography's military applications. Medical topographies charted the connections between health and the environment by observing a location's features, such as soil, air, and water quality, as well as elevation, prevailing winds, common local diseases, sources of potential contagion, and the cleanliness of urban environments. Because a medical-topographic study took time to write and implement, its findings provided little utility during active conflict. Only after the fighting ceased during a campaign could the army make use of a medical topography's findings by taking measures such as draining swamps, relocating hospitals in unhealthy environments, and issuing climate-appropriate gear.

Publisher

University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)

Link

https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cjhh.624-122022

Reference113 articles.

1. The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease

2. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century, xv.

3. This article hopes to clarify the fuzzy distinction between medical topography and other forms of environmental study, notably medical geography. As Ronald Numbers notes, the definition of medical geography “remains unstable.” See: Ronald Numbers, “Medical Science before Scientific Medicine: Reflections on the History of Medical Geography,” in Rupke, “Medical Geography,” 217. Michael Osborne has gone some way toward distinguishing medical topography from medical geography. He notes that medical geographies are “large-scale synthetic” works, while medical topographies are “localized.” See: Michael A. Osborne, “The Geographical Imperative in Nineteenth-century French Medicine,” in Rupke, “Medical Geography,” 32. To Osborne's definition, I would add that medical geographies, and indeed most other environmental studies (such as vital statistics) are more likely to take a quantitative approach, as opposed to medical topography's primarily qualitative approach.

4. The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France