Praise from experts in the fields of health and GIS:

"It is rare to pick up a book that is so completely engaging and crosses so many disciplines and yet ties them together seamlessly. The illustrations in the book are wonderful, a treat by themselves. What Koch gives the reader at the end is a new way of seeing the world, a map of the limitless boundaries of the imagination."           —Dr. Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country and The Tennis Partner

"Tom Koch has written a memorable book about medical maps. He shows how maps of disease are a vital part of epidemiological argument, a necessary but not sufficient part of medical understanding: sometimes maps hide and mislead, other times they reveal and open doorways. An original, scholarly and critical view of the many roles of cartography and its potential." —Professor Peter Haggett, Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Bristol, author of The Geographical Structure of Epidemics

"Tom Koch has created a fascinating and well-written book on disease mapping that should be of interest to epidemiologists and other public health professionals. The sections on John Snow are especially insightful, merging history, cartography and epidemiology." —Ralph R. Frerichs, Professor of Epidemiology, UCLA School of Public Health, author of the popular John Snow site

"This attractively written and beautifully presented book gathers together geography, history, epidemiology, and aspects of the philosophy of science into a treasure-house of information about how we come to understand the nature of disease. Accessible, endlessly fascinating, a book to be savoured and reread with delight." —Professor Mildred Blaxter, University of Bristol

"...Koch has created a must-have manual to understand how public health officials have learned to use mapping to handle the fast-spreading diseases of recent history. This book is not light reading but Koch manages to make this highly technical material a page-turner, holding your interest like a mystery novel. I recommend Cartographies of Disease to anyone in health care who may help control the spread of disease someday." —American Academy of Medical Administrators

A comprehensive survey of the technology of mapping and its relationship to the battle against disease, this look at medical mapping advances a radical argument that maps are not merely representations of spatial realities but a way of thinking about relations between viral and bacterial communities, human hosts, and the environments in which diseases flourish. The history of medical mapping is traced—from its growth in the 19th century during an era of trade and immigration to its renaissance in the 1990s during a new era of globalization. Referencing maps older than John Snow's famous cholera maps of London in the mid-19th century, this survey pulls from the plague maps of the 1600s, while addressing current issues concerning the ability of GIS technology to track diseases worldwide.

About the author:

Tom Koch is adjunct professor of geography (medical) at the University of British Columbia and adjunct professor of gerontology at Simon Fraser University (SFU), both in Vancouver, Canada. In addition he is a bioethicist for the Canadian Down syndrome Society (Resource Council) and a forum associate at the David Lam Centre for International Communication. With undergraduate and graduate degrees in geography Koch earned an interdisciplinary Ph.D. for a dissertation that used GIS mapping to consider the U.S. organ transplant system. The result, his 12th book, was published under the title Scarce Goods: Justice, Fairness, and Organ Transplantation (2001).

Much of his working career has been spent as a journalist and editor involved with daily news writing and preparation. He is a veteran of several daily newspapers in Canada and the USA, of United Press International and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In addition, he has written three books on news and public information as well as over 40 magazine articles and more than 70 academic journal publications. As a gerontologist he is best known for his trilogy of books on aging and elder care, a series that began with Mirrored Lives in 1990.