Sauer's 'Origins and Dispersals': Its Implications for the Geography of Disease

Abstract

Carl Sauer's Bowman Lectures to the American Geographical Society were given forty years ago. Although Sauer remains a major and much cited figure in geography today most of the attention is focused on his historical and environmental writing. This paper looks at the legacy of the Bowman Lectures through the two editions of Agricultural origins and dispersals2 and relates them to a different contemporary problem of origin and dispersal. The emergence of new epidemic diseases in the last two decades raises afresh the question of where and when diseases originate and how they then spread around the world. As for agriculture, the origins of most diseases lies too far in the past to be resolved, while spread can be accurately tracked only over recent centuries. It is argued that Sauer's approach to his problem contains lessons that can be drawn upon in today's approaches to disease origins.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.