Abstract

FERREIRA, Angela Lúcia de Araújo; EDUARDO, Anna Rachel Baracho  and  DANTAS, Ana Caroline de Carvalho Lopes. Medical Geography and Topography Works: the first environmental studies in a specific city. Invest. Geog [online]. 2003, n.52, pp.83-98. ISSN 2448-7279.

The natural environment and the geographical circumstances set the basis for the development of an hygiene-oriented thinking and led physicians to investigate and diagnose the regional and urban space between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. These ideas were systematically compiled in works known as Medical Geography and Topography Works which, when known throughout the world, ended up becoming precise descriptions of the cities' territory, providing a spatial account of diseases and identifying their nature, evolution and treatment. Besides recovering the origin of these treaties and stressing their importance as amongst the first "geographical" investigations of urban space, this work aims to include Brazil, and specifically the city of Natal (in northeast Brazil) within the context of these analyses, with special emphasis on the work entitled Topography of Natal and its Medical Geography authored by doctor Januário Cicco in 1920.

Keywords : Medical Geography; Medical Topography; hygienism; Natal; Brazil.