Whether you live in the city or the countryside can affect your health and susceptibility for disease. Jason Hawkes/Corbis hide caption

Whether you live in the city or the countryside can affect your health and susceptibility for disease.

In 1854, an English doctor named John Snow pinpointed an outbreak of cholera in London to a single contaminated water pump.

A pioneer of modern epidemiology, Snow used information about where the sick people lived to deduce that they were drinking tainted water from that source.

And while using clues about peoples' locations is an important tool in public health, it's now set to make individual health care even more personal.

"Personalized medicine has ... been equated with genomics," says Dr. Rishi Manchandra, author of The Upstream Doctors: Medical Innovators Track Sickness to Its Source and presenter of a TED Talk about environmental influences on health last August. "That's an incomplete view of what personalized means. We are not just creatures of our genes; we are creatures of our environment."

It seems obvious, but doctors don't traditionally ask their patients where they live as part of a medical diagnosis.

A map of toxic waste sites can be combined with maps of waterways and cities to reveal potential health risks. Bill Davenhall/Esri hide caption

A map of toxic waste sites can be combined with maps of waterways and cities to reveal potential health risks.

Some researchers and health professionals are calling the use of mapping in health care "geomedicine," due in part to a 2009 TED Talk by Bill Davenhall, considered the field's father. Clinical data account for only 10 percent of the factors that determine a person's health, Davenhall says.

Excerpt from:

A Field Of Medicine That Wants To Know Where You Live