The Medical Topographies of Ciudad Rodrigo: Society, Territory and Health in the Spanish-Portuguese Border

This research delves into the comprehensive treatment of textual geohistorical sources based on the recovery, analysis and opening of new formulas of scientific knowledge open and extensive to global society. Between 1850 and 1940, more than four hundred medical works (medical geog- raphies or topographies) were produced in Spain under the influence of hygienist theories in urban planning and constituting society a source of valuable information and documentation relatively little studied for the knowledge of the urban and rural spaces of the time. The use of the hypothetical -deductive method, a model widely used in geographical sciences and humanities, has established as a fundamental hypothesis that landscape and the territory and the information contained in the Medical-geographical works "Medical-topographical Data of Ciudad Rodrigo" (1899) and "Data for the Medical Geography of Ciudad Rodrigo" (1920), will be used as a basis for the analysis of the information that, on a geographical scale, provides this documentary typology and proposes a meth-odology for the extraction of geographic information contained in historical documentation. With this, it is intended to optimize the use of secondary sources of knowledge about the territory and society considering the variety and amount of information that can be extracted from them and opening, at the same time, a path of research that links health of the territory and the strategies to the approach territorial problems from the human and historical geography.