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The article focuses on the Hippocratic text "Airs, Waters, Places," and the study of how environments impact human beings' health. The author discusses the history of medicine in terms of geography, analyzes the growing interest in global health, and explores the social aspects of biological history. He explains how the 19th century public health reform movement was influenced by local environments, notes the impact of industrialization and urbanism on health, and emphasizes the study of climatic changes on human biology.

This article examines the International High Altitude Expedition of 1935 and its significance in the life and science of Ancel Keys. Both the expedition and Keys's story afford excellent opportunities to explore the growing reach of interwar physiology into extreme climates--whether built or natural. As IHAE scientists assessed human performance and adaptation to hypoxia, low barometric pressure, and cold, they not only illuminated the physiological and psychological processes of high altitude acclimatization, but they also drew borderlines between the normal and the pathological, paved the way for the neocolonial exploitation of natural and human resources in Latin America, and pioneered field methods in physiology that were adapted and adopted by the Allied Forces during the Second World War. This case study in the physiology of place reveals the power and persistence of environmental determinism within biomedicine well into the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historiography on tropical medicine and determinist ideas about climate and racial difference rightly focuses on links with nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial rule. Occasionally and counterintuitively, however, these ideas have been redeployed as anticolonial argument. This article looks at one such instance; the racial physiology of Indian economist, ecologist, and anticolonial nationalist Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889-1968). It argues that the explanatory context was mid-twentieth-century discussion of global population growth, which raised questions of density and belonging to land. Ecology offered a new language and scientific system within which people and place were conceptually integrated, in this instance to anticolonial ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of climatic change in determining the shape of human evolution, a theme that came to prominence during the early years of the twentieth century, has resurfaced with renewed vigon The author examines the rise and resurgence of the modern history of the idea that hominid evolutionary pathways have been trigged by climatic causes to illustrate the continuing vitality of environmental determinism and to highlight some continuities between early-twentieth-century and contemporary archaeoanthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]