‘Healthy debate’ and ‘healthy ferment’: Medical and health geographies

This paper offers an introduction to a virtual theme issue devoted to medical and health geographies. It argues that significant advances have been made by many of these pieces, some leading and others reflecting fundamental transitions in the theory, methods and studies undertaken by scholars identifying as medical or health geographers. The paper shows how PiHG contributions have orchestrated or captured debates over medical and health geographies, exploring how ‘the medical’ and ‘health’ intersect and diverge, giving rise to different trajectories in both the field as a whole and specific foci of inquiry loosely clustering within it. Questions about ‘two traditions’ (medical or health geography) run throughout, conjoined with questions about associated theoretical orientations, substantive interests, ethico-political commitments and treatments of space, place and akin constructs. Attention is addressed to the limits of what can be covered in such an introductory paper and, indeed, in selecting papers for a virtual theme issue