Although I am a geographer who has been interested in health issues for 40 years, my research has been almost exclusively focused on countries in the Global North, and even more exclusively on the United Kingdom. More specifically, it has embraced geographical epidemiology – the study of disease and illness in particular places – involving a mix of (usually) quantitative and (sometimes) qualitative methods.

The discipline of health geography, which Susan Elliott and I have sought to summarize in three editions of Geographies of Health (2015), has undergone various shifts in emphasis over the last 30 years or so. I have been led to write this present book in part because of the relative lack of research by geographers on global health. Much of the recent focus in health geography has been on topics that have (for example) explored the health and wellbeing of those living near green spaces and attractive walking environments. Yet, in many parts of the world, walking is less for pleasure and more for access to clean water or escape from violence. I hope here to have addressed key issues that affect those living and working outside Anglo-America and Europe; for sure, I have cast my net wide and have endeavoured to cite literature written by those living and working in regions other than my own.

The subject of global health demands an interdisciplinary perspective. The late Paul Farmer and his colleagues have cited anthropology, sociology, political economy and history as the key disciplines (Farmer et al. 2013). In this book I am adding geography to the mix, recognizing of course that it too draws theory and concepts from those and other disciplines. As Herrick and Reubi suggest in the introduction to their edited collection (2017b: x), “Geography has not yet carved out a disciplinary niche within the diffuse domain that constitutes global health”. I wish to help the inscription, which remains insufficiently “carved”: more than ten years have passed since Brown and Moon's (2012) important commentary on geography and global health, although the brief chapter by Brown and Taylor (2018) in Crooks, Andrews and Pearce's comprehensive Handbook of Health Geography offers a tantalizing taste of a research agenda and other chapters in that collection discuss global health concerns.