Submitted by Adjunct Professor Tom Koch
Growing international concern over Ebola has forced me to focus increasingly on the epidemic as it struggles toward pandemic status. My work in medical cartography, a kind of visual history of public health and the conditions that promote disease, has been focused, in recent months, just here.
In August, I privately backgrounded friends involved in World Health Organization discussion on the use of untried drugs in epidemic zones. The University of Chicago Press asked for a blog post on Ebola that reflected the insights from past epidemics mapped in my Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground. In September, I did an audio interview–soon to be posted–for graduate students in Harvard’s History of Science and Technology department. At their request, I wrote an article on Ebola and its mapped history for their magazine, Remedia. Another article is now in press and a third one, in the planning stages, should be out by January.
Besides that work I’ve been engaged with past and current students that I’ve worked with, mostly in medicine and medical ethics, but also in urban studies. They’re a rather varied bunch and located all over the map: Scotland, Calgary, Vancouver, Boston. The goal with each has been to suggest a spatial framework to the research they’re pursuing in public health or in medicine itself.
