In the early 1990s I began to develop the idea of therapeutic landscapes, a framework for examining the features of a place that were conducive or not to health and well-being.  The place could be a shaman’s hut, someone’s home, a specialist clinic, or a large hospital.  I spent a year or more combing the literature in health geography, medical anthropology, medical sociology, and environmental psychology to come up with ideas and examples to give substance to the therapeutic landscapes concept.  I placed all that material into three slots: natural and human-made physical environments, social environments, and symbolic environments.

To test the usefulness of the therapeutic landscapes idea I read up on and visited three places that had established long-term reputations for healing: Epidauros in Greece where the half-god, half-human Asclepius healed in dreams; Bath in England,  a famed spa; and Lourdes in France, notable as a pilgrimage site for Catholics seeking cures.  This book is a detailed application of the therapeutic landscape framework to the three places.  The final chapter brings my analysis to contemporary times by looking at examples of hospitals of various kinds.

This book is a fictionalized account of a teenage boy growing up in a community of Lutheran missionaries in South India.  It attempts to honestly portray his experiences there, steering a course between eulogizing or condemning the missionary endeavor.  Indian and missionary characters weather a cyclone and floods, try to make the grade as a missionary, send out mixed messages in sermons, have their ups and downs on a river trip on a houseboat, are taken to court for shooting a monkey, get caught up in a violent protest, suffer through a child’s illness, become a fantasy spy, take positions on sex, hunt a tiger, and come together for a topsy-turvy retreat at the beach.

The stories told in the book touch on issues of perennial interest: the collision and integration of different worlds and cultures; interpersonal relationships among and between missionaries and Indians, between children and their parents, and between servants and masters; evolution and change; inclusion versus exclusion; religious beliefs; human-environment interactions; sex education; the real and the fake; fantasy versus reality; and taking risks.

This collection of essays argues for a reinvention of medical geography, considering the relationships between human health and the experience of place, influenced by developments in socio-cultural theory and observed health concerns.