Az-Tech Medicine

Natural History, Dec, 1999 by Rob Nicholson

The book's thirteen chapters deal with close to hundred afflictions, beginning with those of the scalp and head and working downward. Leprosy, heart pain, venereal diseases, and "tubercles of the breast" are considered along with more mundane ailments such as "fetid breath," "odor of the armpits," and "rumbling of the abdomen." The final chapter is ominously titled "Of Certain Signs of One Who Is Going to Die."

The medications are drawn from animal, vegetable, and mineral sources, many of which seem preposterous by today's standards, such as calcareous kidney stones and the charred excrement of various birds and animals. (Keep in mind, however, that Premarin, a currently popular estrogen-replacement medication, is derived from the urine of pregnant mares.) The Badianus prescriptions commonly are for combinations of materials, mostly of botanical origin, such as barks, flowers, roots, and woods. The potions pose a puzzle for modern pharmacological researchers, who hope to tease out of each complex stew the one molecule that may be the main active ingredient.

Many of the plants that have been identified are powerhouse producers of efficacious medicinal compounds. Argemone grandiflora, a close relative of the painkilling opium poppy, was known to the Aztecs as chicalote, an analgesic for reducing pain in the groin. Two plates depict Dioscorea (the genus to which true yams belong), some species of which contain powerful steroidal sapogenins. In the 1940s one Mexican species brought a fortune to chemists who discovered how to synthesize the human hormones progesterone (used in oral contraceptives) and testosterone from chemicals held in the plant's tuberous root system.

Conspicuously absent from the volume are most of the hallucinogenic plants found in the other Aztec herbals, such as the sacred cactus peyotl and the mushroom teonanacatl. Perhaps the friars overseeing the project considered it unseemly to recommend these to the court of Spain. The self-deprecating tone of the introduction similarly suggests caution: "Would that we Indians could make a book worthy in the King's sight, for this is certainly most unworthy to come before the sight of such great majesty. But you will recollect that we poor unhappy Indians are inferior to all mortals, and for that reason our poverty and insignificance implanted in us by nature merit your indulgence."

The illustrations are for the most part simple and stylized, far from the photo-realist botanical renderings we've become accustomed to. They don't compare in accuracy with the woodcuts in European herbals produced at about the same time or with the botanical representations of such great Renaissance artists as Albrecht Durer. Nevertheless, some plants are instantly recognizable. A favorite of mine is the depiction of huacalxochitl, identifiable to any botanist as a member of the arum family, which includes jack-in-the-pulpit. The flower shows all the classic features: a white columnar spadix surrounded by a hooded spathe, green outside and aflame with red inside.