Dr. Tom Koch presented the 7^th annual Haynes Lecture Friday afternoon, November 15, at the College of Geosciences. Speaking on the cartographies of disease, Koch discussed maps, mapping and medicine in his lecture "Mapping in a Time of Cholera: John Snow and his Contemporaries."

According to Koch, “The map is the workbench upon which we test our theories of disease.” A focus of his lecture was to deconstruct the myths surrounding the work of John Snow and to reconstruct the true impact of that work.

“John Snow was known as the man who took on death and defeated it at the pump – the water pump that is,” Koch said. Snow studied an 1854 cholera outbreak in the London neighborhood in which he lived by mapping all the deaths in a month long period. He concluded from his map that a contaminated water pump was the source of the bug. Although Snow is often credited for pioneering the use of mapping to study disease, Koch said that disease maps had been in use since the 1700s and were a critical part of the tradition of disease studies long before Snow’s study.

The Haynes Lecture Series was established by Dr. Daniel Sui, professor of Geography and holder of the Reta A. Haynes chair in Geosciences. Many internationally recognized scholars and members of the National Academy of Sciences have presented lectures for the benefit of the University community since the series was established in 2000.

Koch has published many books and articles on the issues of health and illness. In the field of elder care and disability, he pioneered the use of life narratives as a vehicle for the examination of the issues of age, fragility, and change. The first to explore the perspective of the home-based caregiver, Koch has worked with over 150 caring families and written about their perspectives and concerns.

Koch is an adjunct professor of geography (medical) at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; adjunct professor of gerontology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; bioethicist, Canadian Down syndrome Society and a former member of its board of directors; consultant in bioethics and gerontology, Copeman Healthcare Centre, Vancouver, and forum associate at the David Lam Centre for International Communication, Simon Fraser University.  

On Saturday, November 17, Koch was a keynote speaker at the “Geospatial Technologies and Public Health: Mapping Disease, Promoting Health” symposium held at the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center. This one-day symposium was devoted to discussing the recent developments in geospatial technologies and their applications. Several leading researchers and government program officers participated. The symposium was co-sponsored by the Texas A&M Office of the Vice President for Research, the U.S. Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), the Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health & HSC Faculty Senate, Texas A&M Health Science Center, Texas Cooperative Extension Service, and the National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense (FAZD).