Complex Regional Atlases

Summary

The visible opening and closing materials of Comprehensive Regional Atlases (Moscow University Press, 1976) describe the monograph’s scope and present examples of medical-service maps. The opening outlines its treatment of the purposes, content, design, compilation, editing, and use of regional comprehensive atlases. Topics include glaciology and permafrost, zoogeography, medical geography, landscapes, assessment of natural conditions, construction, and services for the population, with particular attention to space-derived information and automation. The preface describes comprehensive atlases as repositories of spatial information organized in systematic, comparable forms and as tools for scientific research. It emphasizes the representation of natural and production systems through their components, properties, interrelationships, and functioning. It also records that Moscow University’s Faculty of Geography began work on a series of regional scientific-reference atlases of the USSR and associated theoretical studies in the late 1950s. The closing appendices show map fragments of medical and preventive institutions and mobile medical services. Their legends distinguish institutional types and specialties, total beds by settlement, beds per thousand inhabitants by medical district, settlements without medical institutions, emergency and consultation stations’ call volumes and service frequencies, and mobile medical facilities. The stated map scales are 1:2,500,000 and 1:6,000,000, respectively. This summary is confined to the visible materials and does not address arguments in the omitted text or conclusions of the whole book.