Visualizing Disease in East Asia, Globalizing the History of Medicine

Dr. Hanson’s research explores medical geography, the use of maps in Chinese medicine, and the first global mapping of disease. Medical mapping was not just a way of thinking but also a way to visualize conceptions of knowledge. Researchers often used maps to think through the relationship between the nature of any given disease and the specific environment that produced it. Her comments will discuss the implications for the history of epidemics of looking at the globe as a whole, and, as an expert on Chinese medicine, she will also reflect on ways global historians of medicine, science, and technology might think about breaking free from western categories of analysis.