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by Tom Koch, 388 pp, with illus, paper, $44.95, ISBN 1-58948-120-8, Redlands, Calif, ESRI Press, 2005.

JAMA. 2006;295:1587-1588.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

This book makes one think about medical maps in a new way. Maps of disease are not necessarily completely objective representations of all the facts in one time and place. Rather, the author convincingly shows medical maps to be highly graphic renderings of subjective arguments about the nature of disease and its causation. Maps may, in fact, by themselves actively construct knowledge. Rather than simply state things, they may help us to think about things. Medical maps may be more akin to an impressionist painting than to the family portrait hanging in the hall.

On one level Koch takes us in thesis-like fashion through a chronologic cataloguing of maps, from a 1694 map of plague in Bari, Italy, to a 2004 map of AIDS in the United States. For academic experts interested in specific subject matter, the book is richly illustrated with pertinent maps and appears meticulously sourced from a . . . [Full Text of this Article]

David O. Freedman, MD, Reviewer
University of Alabama at Birmingham

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