Az-Tech Medicine

Natural History, Dec, 1999 by Rob Nicholson

The History of Medicine in Mexico: The People's Demand for Better Health, an 860-square-foot fresco by the great Diego Rivera, adorns a dim, quiet lobby in the Centro Medico La Raza, a complex of modern hospitals in the heart of Mexico City. Doctors pass it without a glance, even though their heritage is spread before them in an explosion of emotion, color, and form. On the left side of the painting, Rivera depicted the health-care technology of the 1950s--transfusions, vaccinations, X rays, hospital births, and radiation therapy. To the right he showed the practices of the Aztecs, Mexico City's pre-Columbian inhabitants. A worried noble points at his heart while a stern curandero hands him an infusion from the bloom of yolloxochitl, a member of the magnolia family. A midwife and her team bring forth an infant; other healers administer massage, herbal poultices, dental care, medicinal steambaths, and enemas. Trepanation, a primitive cranial operation used by the Aztecs, is also illustrated, attesting both to Rivera's scholarship and to the use of analgesics (could any patient have borne the excruciating pain without them?).

At the center of the mural, faithfully copying an image from the early-sixteenth-century Codex Borbonicus, Rivera painted the Aztec goddess Tlalzolteotl, who was connected with cleansing and fertility. Below her the artist paid homage to another codex (manuscript book), the Badianus Manuscript, by reproducing the majority of its illustrations. Created in 1552, this repository of traditional medicinal knowledge is the legacy of an Aztec artist who labored at a Catholic mission that is now a mere two subway stops from the Centro Medico. Two other compendiums of Aztecana that include medical lore survive from about the same period, one compiled by historian and missionary Bernardino de Sahagun and the other by court physician Fernando Hernandez. These two texts cover a greater number of plant species than the Badianus does, and in the case of Hernandez's work, one could say that the ink drawings are more accurate botanically. But of the three, the Badianus is the oldest, and its renderings are essentially the earliest surviving illustrations of New World plants. Having seen the amazing floral wealth of Mexico on numerous collecting expeditions, I favor the Badianus Manuscript for the kick I get out of recognizing species of plants I have come upon during fieldwork and for the visual joy I derive from the utterly flamboyant colors--as bright as a Mexican cottage garden in full sun.

From 1519 through the 1520s, the Spanish conquistadores and the priests and administrators who followed them did their best to tear down the Aztec monarchy and impose Christianity. In the process, much of Aztec heritage--the accumulated wisdom as well as the artifacts and architecture--was lost or destroyed, including most Aztec works on bark paper. Almost immediately, however, efforts got under way to salvage and record traditional knowledge, including indigenous medications. In 1545, for example, Spanish physician Nicolas Monardes published an (unillustrated) account of botanical cures, a version of which was also translated into English under the title Ioyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde, Wherein Is Declared the Rare and Singuler Vertues of Diuerse and Sundrie Hearbes, Trees, Oyles, Plantes, and Stones, with Their Applications, as Well for Phisicke as Chirurgerie. Plants such as sassafras, tobacco, coca, and "holie woodde" were touted as potent new remedies (the last refers to species of Guaiacum, or lignum vitae, used to treat venereal disease).

At what had been the great marketplace of Tenochtitian (the Aztec capital that became Mexico City), the Franciscan order erected a church and convent known as Santiago de Tlaltelolco. There, in 1536, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza established the College of Santa Cruz, one of the first European-style schools of higher learning for indigenous peoples in the New World. At Santa Cruz, sons of the Aztec nobility were taught to read and write Spanish, Latin, and (using the Western alphabet) Nahuafl, their own language. Other courses were arithmetic, philosophy, and music.

The school also enlisted renowned Aztec healers to teach their medicinal arts. One of these Indians, who was given the Christian name Martinus de la Cruz, rose to the position of Physician of the College. It was he who made the actual compilation of plant descriptions and medicinal uses that is now known as the Badianus Manuscript, but the name that has become attached to it is that of his colleague Juannes Badianus, an Indian instructor of Latin, who rendered the text in that language. No artist was given credit for the colorful illustrations. Scholars theorize that de la Cruz himself painted and labeled each plate and wrote his descriptions in Nahuatl on separate sheets of paper, and that Badianus then did his translations and added them to the illustrations.

The herbal, prepared at the request of the viceroy's son, Francisco de Mendoza, was intended as a gift to Charles I, king of Spain. The first page begins, "A little book of Indian medicinal herbs composed by a certain Indian, physician of the College of Santa Cruz, who has no theoretical learning, but is well taught by experience alone. In the year of our Lord Saviour 1552." The medical manual crossed the sea safely, but there is no record that it ever came into the king's hands. A number of librarian's marks were added inside the cover over the centuries, and the words "Ex Libris Didaci Cortavila," scrawled on the frontispiece, indicate that it once belonged to that Spanish apothecary. Eventually it reached Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597-1679), librarian of the Vatican and cofounder of the renowned Barberini Library in Rome. In 1902 the Barberini Library was absorbed into the Vatican's holdings, and a mere twenty-seven years later the manuscript was brought to light by American historian Charles Clark. Knowledge of the Aztec healers finally reached the world at large in 1940, when a facsimile edition of the Badianus appeared, translated into English and annotated by Emily Walcott Emmart. A reprint edition, An Aztec Herbal: The Classic Codex of 1552, is to be issued shortly by Dover Press.