Visualizing the Geography of Diseases in china, 1870s-1920s: An Overview of the Earliest Disease Maps of China

The discussion explores the first disease maps of China that also present a visual history of the major transformations in modern medicine at the time

Speaker/Performer: Marta Hanson, Johns Hopkins University, Department of the History of Medicine

Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

Why write about maps of disease? Medical mapping is a way of thinking; they are also statements in an argument and evidence furthering a specific case. The function of medical maps is to visualize causal relationships. On the one hand, disease incidence, and on the other hand, potential causes—the climate or weather, water and air quality, geological features, or an unknown poison in the environment. Maps of disease are never merely descriptive but useful ways for researchers to think through the relationship between the nature of any given disease and the specific environment that produced it. They also legitimated new public health interventions. I interpret over 50 medical maps of disease in China from the 1870s to the 1920s as both analytical tools intended to visualize the relationship between space and disease and rhetorical strategies to further new colonial power relations. These disease maps also present a visual history of the major transformations in modern medicine within China from the mid nineteenth-century peak of medical geography to the eventual victory of laboratory medicine by the early twentieth century. Maps, like nineteenth-century vital statistics and Petri-dishes not only made causal relations newly visible, they also made new methods for controlling animal and human populations newly possible.