The history of louse-borne typhoid and Geomedizine.

The experience of World War I made popular the concept of medical geography which become part of Nazism's philosophy of national welfare, safety, and solidarity. The Nazis used it to create propaganda to show some groups as rats, vermin, and Untermenschen (subhumans). In this way, more than ten million people were killed under the Nazi regime: six million Jews, plus more than 5 million Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other groups who were not part of the German theory of "master race." The Germans' fear of typhus that spread in the Wehrmacht was so immense that during the occupation, Polish doctors used this phobia to organize a resistance movement. Contemporarily, the scope of geographical medicine encompasses the following research areas: spatial differentiation of disease incidents and the process of disease diffusion, geographical inequalities in the population's health level and morbidity determinants among the inhabitants of developing countries. In the first half of the XIX century, it played an essential role in the activities aimed against epidemics of infectious diseases, including louse borne typhus, cholera and typhoid fever; linking these diseases to cultural determinants. Under the influence of this idea, the concept of doctor-hygienist emerged and social medicine begun to evolve.