GEOGRAPHY AND HEALTH, A PAST AND PRESENT OVERVIEW

The current public health problems of a society increasingly urbanized require systemic approaches, which should involve various disciplines. Geography as a discipline that studies the geographic space in which occur diseases, it requires recognition that in the relationship human environment since ancient times have been involved in different ways geographic features and how those elements have been materialized in understanding and intervention of disease depending of approaches like the magical view of disease, the determinism of nature, the miasma theory, medical topographies, the medical geography and health geography. These views and conceptual frameworks necessarily were not developed synchronously, on the other hand were the result of ruptures inherent in the development of Western society and the knowledge society.