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Geographies of Health: An Introduction by Anthony C. Gatrell, Oxford and Maiden, MA, Blackwell Publishers, 2002, xv + 294 pp. cloth US$59.95 (ISBN 0-631-219-846); paper US$27.95 (ISBN 0-631-219-854)
In some ways, Canada is a country obsessed with its health-care system. The obsession is first and foremost concerned with having a health-care system in which every Canadian is assured of high-quality medical care regardless of their income, race, ethnicity or personal politics. Canadians are also obsessed with the health-care system because it is one of the most important symbolic ways in which Canadians see themselves as different from the people of the United States. For Canadians, a public and universal health-care system represents a more compassionate and communal society than what exists south of the border. Geographies of Health has nothing to do with the Canadian health-care system. It does, however, have everything to do with understanding health and healthcare as more than the absence of disease or a biomedical response to disease.
Since the early 1990s, a debate has been taking place between the members of one group who continue to call themselves medical geographers and those in another group who prefer to call themselves health geographers. The former group argues that the subdiscipline should remain focused on the traditional themes of medical geography, the geography of disease and the geography of medical resources and the traditional approaches of medical geography, regional studies, cultural ecology and spatial modelling. The latter group argues that medical geography needs to be recast as health geography, divided between the geography of health...