Intriguing intellectual intersections offer the promise of enriching medical geography and making it both more theoretically sophisticated and more policy relevant. Employing a socio-ecological model of health, this paper explores several of these intersections, including the incorporation of...

Ciguatera, a form of fish poisoning with a pantropical distribution, has been a recognized health problem in the Carribean and the Pacific for centuries (in the decade from 1973 to 1983 for the island Pacific region as a whole, reported incidence, conservatively 20% of actual incidence, was...

Regional health systems planning implicitly incorporates information about the distance behavior of hospital patients, in specifying hospital catchment areas, service-specific catchment areas and levels of centralization. Distance behavior of patients varies depending on their particular...

Spatial analyses of disease patterns have been used by investigators as one tool with which to address problems of disease causation. However, while the results of spatial studies may be suggestive, they have been definitive only rarely. This is because there are numerous epistemological,...

This is a case-control study of rural hospitals which closed between 1970 and 1980. Nonmetropolitan hospitals which closed were matched with a comparable set of hospitals which remained open, yielding 148 closures (cases) and 310 controls. Univariate and multivariate analyses indicate that...