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Methodological challenges involved in compiling the Nahua pharmacopeia

Paula De VosSan Diego State University, USA

AbstractRecent work in the history of science has questioned the Eurocentric nature of the field and sought to include a more global approach that would serve to displace center–periphery models in favor of approaches that take seriously local knowledge production. Historians of Iberian colonial science have taken up this approach, which involves reliance on indigenous knowledge traditions of the Americas. These traditions present a number of challenges to modern researchers, including availability and reliability of source material, issues of translation and identification, and lack of systematization. This essay explores the challenges that emerged in the author’s attempt to compile a pre-contact Nahua pharmacopeia, the reasons for these challenges, and the ways they may – or may not – be overcome.

KeywordsNahua, Nahuatl, medicine, pharmacy, pharmacopeia, pharmacology, methodology, colonial Mexico, Florentine Codex, Sahagún, Badianus Manuscript, Relaciones, Francisco Hernández, global history of science

Over the last decade, the field of Iberian colonial science has expanded dramatically, with many valuable contributions from scholars in Europe and the Americas. Much of that work has focused on the relationship between science and empire, documenting the role of the imperial state in the gathering and construction of scientific knowledge, often with the goal of exploiting natural resources for economic gain. Work in the field has also targeted local and regional knowledge networks in the colonies, emphasizing the

Corresponding author:Paula De Vos, History Department, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-6050, USA.Email: [email protected]

712139 HOS0010.1177/0073275317712139History of ScienceDe Vosresearch-article2017

Special Issue: Iberian Science: Reflections and Studies

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De Vos 211

1. See Fa-Ti Fan, “The Global Turn in the History of Science,” EASTS 6 (2010): 249–58. 2. See Sujit Sivasundaram, “Sciences and the Global: On Methods, Questions, and Theory,”

Isis 101:1 (2010): 146–58; Stuart McCook, “Introduction,” Isis 104:4 (2013): 773–6; Carla Nappi, “The Global and Beyond: Adventures in the Local Historiographies of Science,” Isis 104:1 (2013): 102–10; and Lissa Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History: Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation,” Itinerario 33:1 (2009): 9–30. Within the same vein are other edited collections: Laszlo Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires: A Decentered View (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood (eds.), Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittburgh Press, 2016). I would like to thank Matthew Crawford for pointing out these paral-lels and suggesting these readings to me.

3. See above citations as well as Roy McLeod, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis’: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,” Historical Records of Australian Science 5:3 (1982): 1–16 and Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). These gener-ally argue against George Basalla’s model of the diffusion of western science in “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156 (1967): 611–22. Recent work has also emphasized the work of go-betweens and intermediaries and the kinds of negotiations that took place within these processes. See, for example, Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo (eds.), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009) and James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (eds.), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2007).

originality and dynamism of knowledge production outside the European context. Recent work in the Americas has also highlighted interaction between indigenous and coloniz-ing peoples, and the fact that colonizers relied upon indigenous knowledge, especially in the first decades after contact.

These efforts parallel a larger movement within the history of science to expand beyond the Eurocentrism that has dominated much of the field over the past century, despite the intentions of its early founders.1 Several journal fora have convened to discuss the issue, resulting in a number of thoughtful reflections and discussions about the state of the field, its future prospects, and the multiple challenges that a more global approach to the history of science entails.2 One prevailing issue involves the tension between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ – how to integrate a widening scope that includes local contexts without losing coherence in the field, and how to examine knowledge traditions outside of Europe with-out using European concepts and categories as the starting point of analysis. With regard to these issues, authors in the field have intentionally challenged earlier ‘diffusionist’ arguments about the flow of knowledge and knowledge production from European ‘center’ to colonial ‘periphery’, arguing instead for other ways of viewing knowledge production – through ‘multiple metropoli’, global networks, or ‘centers of calculation’ that emphasize the flow of knowledge through concepts of circulation, contact zones, or zones of trade.3 Such concepts serve to displace Europe as the (only) center of an excep-tional scientific tradition – but the messy complexity of these interactions necessitates that historians of science also take into account the disjunctures, interruptions, confusions, and unequal power relations that this flow entailed as well.

212 History of Science 55(2)

4. Sivasundaram, “Sciences and the Global,” in particular addresses this issue. 5. See, for example, Karen Cowan Ford, Las yerbas de la gente: A Study of Hispano-American

Medicinal Plants (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1975); Maximinio Martínez, Las plantas medicinales de Mexico, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Sociedad Herbolaria de America, 2010); Xavier Lozoya and Mariana Lozoya, Flora medicinal de México, primera parte: Plantas indigenas (Mexico: IMSS, 1982); Paul C. Standley, Trees and Shrubs of Mexico (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1967); the many publications of Robert Bye; Margarita Artschwager Kay, Healing with Plants in the American and Mexican West (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Paul Hersch, Plantas medicinales: Relato de una posibil-itdad confiscada. El estatuto e la flora en la biomedicine Mexicana (México: INAH, 2000); and Atlas de las plantas de la medicina tradicional Mexicana: Atlas of Plants of Mexican Indigenous Medicine (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1994).

6. See Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, “Empirical Aztec Medicine,” Science 188:4185 (1975): 215–20; X. A. Domíngues S., “Algunos aspectos químicos y farmacológicos de sustancias aisladas de las plantas descritas en el Códice Badiano” (Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis), Revista de la Sociedad Quimica Mexicana 13:2 (1969): 85–9 gives an excellent overview of efforts to test the chemical components and bioactivity of traditional herbal med-icines in Mexico and provides bibliography of other examples of these studies.

One of the major issues confronting historians who wish to expand beyond Eurocentrism in the history of science lies in the documentary base available – the asym-metrical availability of documentation created by and for Europeans that thus tends to favor European voices and perspectives.4 This is the case for colonial Latin America, in which the pre-contact documentary record is relatively sparse. In Mesoamerica, for example, only a few pre-contact pictorial manuscripts, or codices, have survived, so that historians must rely almost exclusively on written sources produced after conquest and within the colonial regime for knowledge regarding pre-contact Mesoamerican society. This is especially true for the history of medicine among the Nahua, for which the most valuable Nahua sources depicting pre-contact practices were all produced in the first fifty years or so following the fall of Tenochtitlan to Cortés in 1521, and all within the framework and with the support of the colonial regime.

These sources are very valuable and have allowed historians and anthropologists to trace the outlines of Nahua medical theory and some practice, but the nature of the docu-ments and their colonial provenance require that scholars approach them with caution and a deep understanding of the context in which they were produced. Issues of lan-guage, translation, and codification, moreover, have hindered our ability to gain a syn-thetic understanding of the Nahua pharmacopeia or its ‘materia medica’: the collection of substances used as medicines to treat disease. Using the sources available, ethnobota-nists have produced encyclopedic reference works that seek careful identification of and scientific nomenclature for the medicinal plants they specify.5 Alternatively, chemists have carried out chemical analyses to determine the bioactivity for a limited number of individual substances.6 The encyclopedic works, written by and designed for ethnophar-macologists, ethnobotanists, and herbalists, list and describe each of the hundreds of substances in use. The studies of the chemical properties of a handful of Nahua materia medica, conversely, do not give an adequate sense of its breadth and versatility, nor do their authors explain how or why those particular substances were selected out of the

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hundreds of possibilities. Neither type of work, in other words, gives a broad, synthetic understanding of the Nahua pharmacopeia, or sheds light on which medicines were used most widely and most often in pre-contact and immediate post-contact Nahua society.

Such an understanding of the Nahua pharmacopeia, however, is important for a num-ber of reasons. First and foremost, as we shall see below, the Nahua made use of hun-dreds of medicinal substances from a wide variety of plant, animal, and mineral sources. Nahua materia medica is representative of Mexico’s great biodiversity and of a rich indigenous medical tradition, but it also highlights the versatility of Mesoamerican agri-culture and the complexity of its material culture. Indeed, the substances employed as medicines in Nahua society were highly interwoven and complementary, grown and used interdependently in a unique Mesoamerican complex in which these substances served a variety of purposes and possessed both physical and metaphysical significance. The existence of the Nahua pharmacopeia in the colonial documentation, and the fact that many of the herbs mentioned are still used by curanderos (native healers) today, also indicate that this tradition continued to thrive throughout the colonial period and beyond. These characteristics only become clear, however, from a comprehensive and accessible overview of the substances named most often in the texts.

This overview, furthermore, is necessary not only for what it reveals about Nahua medical, botanical, and agricultural knowledge and practice, but also in order to trace its global dispersal in the centuries after contact. Without a comprehensive understanding of Nahua materia medica, for example, it is difficult to gauge the extent to which Europeans were able to exploit it, or the extent to which European medicine was influenced by it. Accessible knowledge of the Nahua pharmacopeia also makes it available for global comparison, not only with the materia medica of early modern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East (which largely comprised one tradition), but also that of sub-Saharan Africa, South, Southeast, Central, and East Asia, and Oceania – not to mention compari-son with the Andean and Amazonian traditions of the Nahuas’ neighbors to the south.

With these factors in mind, as part of a larger project on the history of pharmacy in New Spain, I set out to provide a comprehensive sense of the Nahua pharmacopeia, but in the process of compiling the data for it, I ran into a number of methodological chal-lenges. The purpose of this essay is to present and explain these challenges in a way that highlights both the difficulties and the promise of using the documentation available. It begins with an explanation of the sources available for the study of Nahua materia med-ica and the context in which they were produced; the method by which I went about compiling a comprehensive understanding of their pharmacopeia; and the methodologi-cal challenges that such a survey produced. These challenges, as I discuss in the final part of the essay, also point to a number of issues that historians of science who examine the contact between very different cultures must take into consideration.

The sources

The documents available for surveying Nahua medical practices and materia medica must be approached with caution and an understanding of the context in which they were produced. Mesomerica at the time of contact – like the Iberian Peninsula – was com-posed of many different polities of peoples with different languages, cultures, and tradi-tions. This region, which ranges from the altiplano highlands of central Mexico to the


7. Terence Kaufman, “The History of the Nawa Language Group from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century: Some Initial Results,” Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoameric, 2001.

8. Lyle Campbell, Terrence Kaufman and Thomas Smith Stark, “Meso-America as a Linguistic Area,” Language 62:3 (1986): 530–58; T. Kaufman and J. Justeson, “Historical Linguistics and Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica,” Ancient Mesoamerica 20:02 (2009): 221–31. Available at: http://www.albany.edu/anthro/maldp/Nawa.pdf (accessed 20 May).

9. Christopher A. Pool, Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica. Cambridge World Archaeology (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Richard Diehl, The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization. Ancient Peoples and Places Series (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004); Michael Coe and Richard Diehl, In the Land of the Olmec, Vols. 1 and 2 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980).

10. These included terraced farming for the cultivation of the archetypal Mesoamerican dietary staples of maize, squash, and beans; architectural style of ceremonial complexes; religious polytheism and blood sacrifice; astronomical observation accompanied by a dual solar and divinatory calendar system; a ball game played using a rubber ball; city–state organization based on tribute and trade relations; and widespread use of obsidian and jade. There is an ongoing debate as to whether the Olmecs constituted a “mother” culture for Mesoamerica or a more shared role as a “sister.” For recent articles focused around the provenance of pottery shards as a basis for determining that role see Robert J. Sharer et al., “On the Logic of Archaeological Inference: Early Formative Pottery and the Evolution of Mesoamerican Societies,” Latin American Antiquity 17:1 (2006) and Hector Neff et al., “Smokescreens in the Provenance Investigation of Early Formative Mesoamerican Ceramics,” Latin American

Yucatán lowlands extending into what is today Central America, is home to ten different language families and over 125 different languages. Among those language groups arose a number of different complex cultures with their own cultural and linguistic identities and traditions. These included the Otomi peoples along the northern edge of the region, the Mixtec and Zapotec speakers of Oaxaca, the Purépecha (Tarascan) speakers of Michoacán, the Maya of Yucatán and northern Central America, and the Nahuas of cen-tral Mexico – though their language family, Uto-Aztecan, extends far to the north into the borderlands region and beyond, the place of their origins before a series of migrations brought Nahuatl speakers into the region around 500CE.7

Despite their variety and differences, these groups shared certain commonalities that have led scholars to view Mesoamerica as an integrated region. Their history is generally divided into three main epochs prior to contact with Europeans – the Pre-Classic or Formative period, lasting from ca. 1500BCE to 200CE, the Classic period from ca. 200 to 900CE, and the Post-Classic from 900 to 1500CE, with largely shared watershed peri-ods dividing each. Their languages for the most part demonstrated shared structural fea-tures and word borrowings, indicating the sustained interaction from early periods that constitutes a roughly unified linguistic area.8 Many of the major groups also displayed common cultural and social traits over the centuries, based upon their shared heritage with the earliest complex society to develop in Mesoamerica, that of the Olmecs, centered around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.9 Olmec society arose during the Pre-Classic period and developed many features that were utilized and expanded upon by subsequent groups to such an extent that it is referred to as a “mother” or “sister” culture in the region.10

http://www.albany.edu/anthro/maldp/Nawa.pdf

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Antiquity 17:1 (2006): 104–18, which are responses to articles from 2005 in the same journal. J.B. Stoltman et al., “Petrographic Evidence Shows that Pottery Exchange between the Olmec and their Neighbors was Two-way,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences102:32 (2005): 11213–18, and Kent V. Flannery et al., “Implications of New Petrographic Analysis for the Olmec ‘Mother Culture’ Model,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102:32 (2005): 11219–23. See also Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, “Formative Mexican Chiefdoms and the Myth of the ‘Mother Culture’,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 19 (2000): 1–37. Regardless of its outcome, the debate itself serves to highlight the Olmecs’ formative influence as well as the shared heritage of Mesoamerican cultures.

11. For an overview of Teotihuacan and its significance for later societies, see David Carrasco et al., Mesoamerica’s Classic Heritage: From Teotihuacan to the Aztecs (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002). No one knows the language the Teotihuacanos spoke, but linguists believe that it was likely either Mixe-Zoquean or Totonaco.

12. See Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (London: Thames & Hudson); Linda Schele and David Freidel, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (New York: William Morrow, 1990); and Dennis Tedlock, 2000 Years of Mayan Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) for overviews of Maya writing.

13. See Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Pictorial Documents and Visual Thinking in Postconquest Mexico,” in Elizabeth Hill Boone and Tom Cummins (eds.), Native Traditions in the Postconquest World (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998), pp.149–200; Elizabeth Hill Boone, Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) for Diego de Landa’s auto de fe among the Maya.

Following the decline of Olmec dominance, two major areas of influence arose upon its foundations during the Classic period – that of the Maya in Yucatán, Guatemala, and Belize, and that of Teotihuacan centered around the Valley of Mexico, but with wide-spread influence throughout central Mexico and extending into Maya regions.11 The Post-Classic period then saw the rise of the Nahua-speaking Toltecs, followed by the Mexica (the Aztecs) who, at the height of their power, governed an area roughly similar to that of Teotihuacan, a society they revered.

One of the most notable features of Pre-Classic Olmec society was the development of the numeric and hieroglyphic script that would serve as the basis for writing traditions of subsequent cultures, including the Maya, the Mixtecs, and the Nahua. The Maya developed the most complex of these, inscribing pottery and monument murals as well as whitewashed bark folded into accordion-like screenfolds or codices.12 Mixtecs and Nahuas also produced codices on screenfolds of whitewashed deerskin that could be unfolded and hung up for viewing. Of the untold numbers of codices produced among these societies prior to contact, however, only twelve still exist – the victim of the destruction accompanying conquest as well as practices of book-burning among Mexica leaders and later Spanish friars anxious to erase the vestiges of what they saw as a threat-ening past.13 The Maya and Nahua shared many of the same materials and material cul-ture, and there was extensive trade between them, but my research into Mesoamerican materia medica focused on the Nahua culture due to its widespread influence and the fact that it was the colonial core of New Spain and has the most complete postconquest docu-mentary record. At times, Zapotec and Mixtec materials are involved as well; these


14. See Boone, “Pictorial Documents,” pp. 159–61.15. For examples of publications that have used the Codex in this way, see Bernard Ortiz de

Montellano, “Syncretism in Mexican and Mexican-American Folk Medicine,” 1992 Lecture Series, Working Papers No. 5, Department of Spanish and Portuguese (College Park, MD, 1989), 3–23; “Las yerbas de Tláloc,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 14 (1980): 287–314; Aztec Health, Medicine, and Nutrition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Alfredo López Austin, “De las enfermedades del cuerpo humano y de las medicinas contra ellas,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 8 (1969): 51–122; and the culminating The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas (2 Vols.) (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1988).

16. See Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006); and Camilla Townsend, “Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico,” The American Historical Review 108:3 (2003): 659–87.

17. See James Lockhart, Nahuas after the Conquest (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992) and Serge Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico: Westernization of Indian Societies from the 16th to the 18th Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1993).

18. The term is from Paul Ricoeur; see David Carrasco’s use of the idea in the Mesoamerican con-text in Quetzalcóatl and the Ironies of Empire: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

societies, were all part of a larger trading network, and the latter cultures were incorpo-rated into the Aztec Empire and tribute system.

The lack of pre-contact codices means that researchers studying Mesoamerican soci-ety and culture have had to rely largely upon post-contact writings produced in the colo-nial context. These include about 500 Nahua codices or pictorial manuscripts, often produced within an institutionalized colonial framework, as well as Spanish chronicles, histories, and geographic surveys. A number of the written sources deal with medicine specifically, including two mid-century codices: the Florentine Codex, a 12-volume eth-nographic account of Nahua society, culture, and history based upon native interviews; and the Badianus Manuscript of Nahua medicine.14 Other sources include the writings of the royal physician Francisco Hernández, sent by the Spanish Crown to record Mexican materia medica in the 1570s; the Relaciones geographicas, a collection of surveys of Mexican natural resources carried out in roughly the same period; and a series of medical texts written by Spanish physicians and friars for treatment of the sick in rural areas.

Taken together, these sources produce a relative wealth of documentation of Nahua history, and the medical texts constitute a rich storehouse of information on Nahua theo-ries of the body, conceptions of disease, and materia medica.15 However, they must be approached with caution. The Florentine Codex, often thought to represent the truest account of Nahua culture, refers to Mexica gods as “devils,” and both Camilla Townsend and Matthew Restall have effectively shown that its treatment of the conquest must not be taken at face value.16 Serge Gruzinski and James Lockhart have also traced the ways in which the alphabetization of Nahuatl and Christian conversion efforts served to alter Nahua linguistic patterns, world view, and notions of time.17 Such factors have led David Carrasco to argue that the early ethnographic sources need to be approached with a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”18 Limitations of written source material have also led

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19. Some examples of works that combine ethnohistorical sources with anthropological and archeological work include: Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, “Specialization, Market Exchange, and the Aztec State: A View from Huexotla,” Current Anthropology 21:4 (1980): 459–78; Michael E. Smith and Frances F. Berdan, “Archaeology and the Aztec Empire,” World Archaeology 23:3 (1992): 353–67; Michael E. Smith, “Archaeology and the Aztec Economy: The Social Scientific Use of Archaeological Data,” Social Science History 11:3 (1987): 237–59; Michael E. Smith, “Long-distance Trade under the Aztec Empire: The Archaeological Evidence,” Ancient Mesoamerica 1:2 (1990): 153–69; and Michael E. Smith, “The Expansion of the Aztec Empire: A Case Study in the Correlation of Diachronic Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Data,” American Antiquity 52 (1987): 37–54.

20. Interdisciplinarity is one of the themes highlighted in the discussions of the global history of science.

21. In that project, I surveyed twelve books of simples (single-action drug substances) from the Mediterranean from the fifth century BCE (Hippocrates) to the nineteenth century CE. See Paula De Vos, “European Materia Medica in Historical Texts: Longevity of a Tradition and Implications for Future Use,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 132:1 (2010): 28–47.

anthropologists and archeologists to study artifacts of Mexica material culture in order to correct and add depth to our understanding of Nahua culture and the structure of the Aztec Empire.19 However helpful, their methods and expertise lie largely outside the scope of historical training, but raise the prospect of interdisciplinary approaches and teamwork for historians of science.20

Nevertheless, the written sources do provide enough information to assemble a com-prehensive view of the Nahua materia medica. To carry out this project, I initially recorded the medicinal substances named in each of eleven different sources. My plan was to determine which substances appeared in the greatest number of sources, the same method I used to obtain a compilation of Mediterranean materia medica.21 In other words, my aim was to determine how much overlap there was among substances named in the eleven sources, some of which were organized by medicinal substance (listing each substance one time), and some of which were organized by disease, with various substances listed to counteract the disease (listing various substances to treat different diseases in which some substances were named multiple times). However, it quickly became apparent that there was remarkably little overlap among the substances included in the different sources, and a wide variety of substances – over 1,200 – named (an issue I explore further on). In this way, the sources that listed medicines, and thus named each substance only one time, would not help me to understand which of them were used most frequently or were most prominent in the Nahua pharmacopeia. For this reason, I limited the sources to the four (described below) that were organized by disease. In these sources, certain substances were named multiple times, and by recording how many times each substance was cited, I could keep a tally to determine which ones were named most fre-quently. I then ordered each substance by frequency of citation and was able to produce a list of the 110 substances (of which I was able to identify 90) that appeared most fre-quently in the texts.

Each of the four sources consulted (see Table 1) was compiled by indigenous authors or through indigenous informants; each was produced in response to the particular, com-plicated context of sixteenth-century Mexico; and none were published until the


22. See Inga Clendinnen, Ambivant Conquests and “Disciplining the Indians: Franciscan Ideology and Missionary Violence in Sixteenth-Century Yucatán,” Past and Present 94:1 (1982): 27–48 for Franciscan efforts in Yucatan, and Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1966] 1982) for evangelization efforts generally.

23. Ricard, Spiritual Conquest, Chapter 14, and Frances Karttunen, “From Court Yard to the Seat of Government: The Career of Antonio Valeriano, Nahua Colleague of Bernardino de Sahagún,” Actes: La “découverte” des langues et des écritures d’Amérique (1995): 113–20.

nineteenth century, though they circulated widely in manuscript form. The two earliest sources, the Badianus Manuscript and the Florentine Codex, were compiled in the context of Franciscan evangelization efforts in the sixteenth century. Members of the Franciscan Order were the clergy of choice for Cortés and the Spanish Crown for early evangeliza-tion. Having recently undergone significant reform, they were known to be zealous and highly principled, embracing asceticism and rejecting ambition and hierarchy – the per-fect candidates, in Cortés’s mind, to meet the significant challenges of spreading Christianity in New Spain.22 In 1524, twelve Franciscans (known as “The Twelve”) arrived in Mexico City in a highly symbolic journey that signified the start of evangeliza-tion efforts in earnest. The Twelve met with a series of difficulties, including language barriers and lack of personnel and infrastructure, which they attempted to overcome by learning indigenous languages and setting up schools in colonial urban centers to train the sons of Nahua nobility and those of promising intellect and ability in Christianity and teach the traditional topics of the medieval university – the trivium and the quadrivium – with the idea of creating a native clergy (though the ordination of indigenous men was later outlawed by an order in 1555). The principle school in this regard was that of Santa Cruz, established in Tlatelolco, the sister city of Tenochtitlán and home to a great market-place where thousands reportedly convened each day. Consecrated on January 6, 1536, the Epiphany, the school was established under the efforts of New Spain’s first Archbishop, Juan de Zumárraga, and its first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, who provided funds for the sixty boys who made up its initial class and who lived at the school.23

Two major sources of information about Nahua medicine – the Cruz-Badianus Manuscript and the Florentine Codex – were produced at this school. The first, which is also referred to as the Codex Barberini due to its location in the Vatican library, was written or dictated by Martín de la Cruz, a Nahua physician of noble descent, who acted

Table 1. Sources of knowledge of indigenous medicine used in the survey.

Source Date compiled/published Number of substances included

Badianus Manuscript 1550s 492Sahagún Book 10 1560s 159Sahagún Book 11 1560s 117Barrios 1570s 635Relaciones geográficas – Mexico 1580s 46Relaciones geográficas – Oaxaca 1580s 30Relaciones geográficas – Tlaxcala 1580s 31

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24. Viceregal orders allowed de la Cruz to continue to practice medicine among the Nahuas, especially among the elite boys at the school: Carlos Viesca Trevino, “…Y Martin de la Cruz, autor del Códice de la Cruz Badiano, era un medico tlatelolco de carne y hueso,” Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl 25 (1995): 479–98. Its Latin title is Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis. Debates over the level of syncretism/hybridity it represents are found in Carlos Viesca Trevino, “El Códice de la Cruz Badiano, primer ejemplo de una medicina mestiza,” in José Maria Lopez Pinero and José Luis Fresquet Febrer (eds.), El mestizaje cultural de la medicina novohispana del siglo XVI (Valencia: Instituto de estudios documentales e historicos sobres la ciencia, 1995), pp. 71–90; Debra Hassig, “Transplanted Medicine: Colonial Mexican Herbals of the Sixteenth Century,” Anthropology and Aesthetics 17/18 (1989): 30–53; and Millie Gimmel, “Reading Medicine in the Codex de la Cruz Badiano,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69:2 (2008): 169–92.

25. Gimmel, “Reading Medicine,” p. 172.

as a doctor to the boys in the school – hence the actual title of the manuscript as “A Book of Indian Medical Herbs composed by a certain Indian physician of the College of Santa Cruz, who is not theoretically learned but is taught only by experience.”24 It was trans-lated from Nahuatl to Latin by Juan Badianus, a Nahua instructor at the school.25 The book is divided into thirteen chapters, each of which provided cures for different ill-nesses that followed a head-to-toe pattern often found in European medical texts. It refers to 492 different substances (see Table 2) and contains 204 illustrations of various plants and trees named in the manuscript and as such is often referred to as an ‘herbal’, assumed to fit within the European tradition of herbals.

The manuscript was commissioned by Francisco de Mendoza as a gift for Charles V. Mendoza’s father, Antonio, had remained an important patron of the school long after he had left his post as Viceroy of New Spain, having given lands and livestock to the school as late as 1551. He had also granted special privileges to Martin de la Cruz, including the legal right to possess a pony, a right typically prohibited to indigenous people, and “to go

Table 2. Overlap of indigenous substances in Sahagún Book 10, Sahagún Book 11, Badianus, and Barrios.

Source comparison Total number of substances in each book

Overlap between sources: number of medicines named in all sources

Total number of different substances named in all sources

Percentage of overlap

Sahagún Books 10 and 11

Book 10: 159Book 11: 117

21 255 8.2%

Sahagún Book 10Sahagún Book 11Badianus MS

Book 10: 159Book 11: 117Badianus: 489

28 717 3.9%

Sahagún Books 10Sahagún Book 11Badianus MSBarrios Treatise Four

Book 10: 159Book 11: 117Badianus: 489Barrios: 635

17 (in all 4 sources)116 (in 3 of 4)

1247 1.4% (in all 4)9.3% (in 3 of 4)


26. Viesca Trevino, “…Y Martín de la Cruz,” p. 485.27. Gimmel, “Reading Medicine,” p. 172.28. Gimmel, “Reading Medicine,” p. 175; Viesca Trevino, “…Y Martín de la Cruz.” In 1558,

Francisco Mendoza was granted an asiento (exclusive right) to plant seeds of black peppers, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, saffron, sandalwood, and ‘China root,’ a purgative medicine used to treat fevers: Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Indiferente 606, Legajo 2, f. 121r. For his commercial ties and gathering practices, see “The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire,” Journal of World History 17:4 (2006): 399–427, and Daniela Bleichmar, “Books, Bodies, and Fields: Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic Encounters with New World Materia Medica,” in L. Schiebingr and C. Swan (eds.) Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp.83–99 and Viesca Trevino, “…Y Martín de la Cruz” for his meetings with Nicholas Monardes.

29. Gimmel, “Reading Medicine”; Hassig, “Transplanted Medicine”; as well as Peter Furst, “‘This Little Book of Herbs’: Psychoactive Plants as Therapeutic Agents in the Badianus Manuscript of 1552,” in R. Schultes and S. von Reis (eds.), Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline (Portland: Dioscorides Press, 1995), pp.108–30; and Domíngues, “Algunos aspec-tos.” See also German Somolinos d’Ardois, “Estudio Histórico,” in Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis (Mexico: Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, 1964).

out riding on it…without embargo nor impediment whatsoever….”26 In this way, the Mendozas had close ties to the school and the resources it could provide and specifically asked Cruz to write a “little book of Indian herbs and medicine” that they could use “to recommend the Indians to his Royal Majesty.”27 In fact, it appears that Francisco de Mendoza presented the book to Philip II (who had succeeded his father before the book was completed) along with a shipment of useful plants meant to showcase New Spain’s agricultural potential, and to solicit exclusive commercial rights to trade in those plants.28

Many valuable studies of the manuscript have issued over the last two centuries, with arguments often centered around the issue of to what degree the manuscript represents a reliable or ‘pure’ account of Nahua medicine – highlighting the European elements of the work or, conversely, the Nahua elements adapted to the European textual tradition. There are some studies of isolated diseases or plants named within the work as well and some comparison with other works of Nahua medicine.29 For the most part, however, there is relatively little attention paid to the medicines named within the Codex, many of which have no translation, and few of which overlap with other texts.

The second source on Nahua medicine associated with the College of Santa Cruz Tlatelolco is the Florentine Codex, a compilation of decades of research organized by Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590), a Franciscan friar and co-founder of the college, where he taught Latin. Born in Spain in 1499 and educated at the University of Salamanca, Sahagún came to New Spain in 1529 and spent the rest of his life there. In an effort to know better the people he was attempting to educate and convert, and to preserve knowl-edge of a society that was rapidly changing, Sahagún recorded and compiled information about Nahua history and culture, assembled in different compilations throughout the 1550s and 1560s. The final version of his work was compiled in Mexico City in 1565–69, entitled General History of the Things of New Spain, but commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex due to the fact that the only extant copy of the full manuscript resides in the Laurentian Library of Florence.

De Vos 221

30. Jorge Kor de Alva, “Sahagún and the Birth of Modern Ethnography: Representing, Confessing, and Inscribing the Native Other,” in J. J. Klor de Alva, H. B. Nicholson, and E. Quinones Kever (eds.), The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún (Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York, 1988), pp.31–52. See also Alfredo Lopez Austin, “The Research Method of Sahagún,” in Munro S. Edmonson (ed.), Sixteenth-Century Mexico: The Work of Sahagún (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), pp.111–50.

31. See Kartunnen, “From Court Yard to the Seat of Government.” (1995).32. “Introduction,” in Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, The Florentine Codex: General History of

the Things of New Spain, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1950–1982).

33. There is a vast literature on Sahagún and the Florentine Codex. The main contours of its his-tory and historiography can be found in the introduction of Miguel Leon-Portilla, Bernardino de Sahagún: First Anthropologist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012).

Sahagún organized the General History into twelve books, which include information about virtually every conceivable aspect of Nahua history and culture: religion, cosmol-ogy, natural history and the natural world, society and practices, and Cortés’s conquest of the Mexica. It is possibly the single most important source of knowledge about Nahua culture. To gather the information for it, Sahagún employed a variety of informants, gathered mainly from his Nahua students at the college, who interviewed Nahua nobility in Tepepulco, Tlatelolco, and Tenochtitlán according to a series of questionnaires that Sahagún prepared. These questionnaires were written and the answers recorded in alpha-betized Nahuatl with pictographs to accompany them. Sahagún confirmed the informa-tion by having it checked by multiple informants from different places, and he also translated (though not word-for-word) the answers into Spanish. For our purposes, Books 10 and 11 provide valuable information regarding Nahua medicine and drug therapy. Chapter 28 of Book 10 treats “Illnesses of the human body and the medicines against them” and named 159 different substances, and Book 11, “On the forests, gardens, orchards of the Mexican language,” includes various chapters on the animals, trees, herbs, stones, metals, dyes, and waters of Mexico, 117 of which had medicinal applica-tions (see Table 2).

Due to his careful method and multiple checks for accuracy and consistency, Sahagún has been referred to as America’s “first anthropologist” and the first to conduct modern ethnographic study, a study referred to as “the most thorough, objective, and complete study of another culture that had ever been attempted.”30 While modern commentators applaud the work because of how much it resonates with modern anthropological meth-ods, it met with much suspicion in the sixteenth century.31 Friars, as well as the Crown, were concerned that the work served to preserve the very idolatrous practices that Florentine Codex was attempting to understand in order to eradicate and counteract them. Philip II ordered that the manuscript be collected and brought to Spain for exami-nation and in 1580 it was delivered to him by Fray Rodrigo de Sequera.32 The manuscript and other copies were not published at the time, but were clearly known and show up in various histories and legal treatises in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, published editions and translations of the Florentine Codex have made it an indispensable tool for historians of pre-contact and colonial Mexico, and it is a crucial source for knowing the Nahua pharmacopeia.33


34. S. Varey and R. Chabran (ed.), The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 46, “Instructions of Philip II to Dr. Francisco Hernández,” January 11, 1570.

35. Juan de Barrios, Verdadera medicina, cirugia, y astrologia (Mexico City: F. Balli, 1607). See also Juan Comas, “Influencia de la farmacopea y terapéutica indígenas de Nueva Espana en la obra de Juan de Barrios (1607),” Anales de Antropología 8 (1971): 125–50.

36. There were several different sets of questionnaires sent out throughout the colonial period, but that of the 1570s is generally considered the most complete. See Howard F. Cline, “The

Scholars have used it to understand Nahua concepts of disease and the human body, and, to a lesser extent, Nahua pharmacology and therapeutics. As with the Badianus Manuscript, however, there is little comparative or comprehensive work regarding the materia medica it names.

The next two sources utilized to survey the Nahua pharmacopeia issued from efforts on the part of the imperial state to make an accounting of the natural resources in New Spain. The first derives from the work of Francisco Hernández, Royal Protomédico, who received orders from Philip II on January 11, 1570, to collect information and specimens in the New World. He was specifically ordered to go to New Spain first to consult with local “doctors, medicine men, herbalists, Indians, and other persons with knowledge in such matters” to “gather information generally about herbs, trees, and medicinal plants in whichever province you are at the time [and]…find out how the above-mentioned things are applied, what their uses are in practice, their powers, and in what quantities the said medicines are given….”34 In accordance with the orders, Hernández traveled with a geographer and painter and met with lots of indigenous people who would bring him specimens and describe their uses through translators. He spent seven years traveling throughout central Mexico and compiled many volumes recording information he learned about thousands of medicinal plants, animals, and minerals.

Hernández’s contribution to knowledge of Mexican flora especially is enormous: eighteenth-century naturalists set out to complete his work, referred to as that of the ‘second Pliny’; ethnobotanists to this day refer to him as an authority; and arguably his work has never been surpassed. However, his work, like that of Sahagún and the Badianus Manuscript, was not published upon its transport to Spain and much of it was destroyed in a fire in the library of the Escorial, where it was housed. A number of copies and redac-tions of the work, however, were circulating and reached various scholars in Europe and Mexico, who then published parts of it. One part of Hernández’s opus, the Index Medicamentorum, consisted of a concise list of a series of diseases, again following the head-to-toe pattern of European medical treatises, for which various Nahua herbs were prescribed. This Index was included in certain versions of Gregorio López’s Treasure of Medicines, and also appears in Juan de Barrios’s Verdadera medicina, cirugia, y astrolo-gia published in 1607.35 Consisting of twenty folios naming 635 different substances, the Index was included as Book 4 of Barrios’s treatise and provides a useful overview of Hernández’s compilation (see Table 2).

Finally, the Relaciones geográficas of the 1570s constitute another important source for knowledge of the Nahua pharmacopeia. These reports consist of the responses to a 50-question survey about local geography, climate, and demography sent by the Spanish Crown to colonial administrators in the 1570s.36 There were several surveys of this type

De Vos 223

Relaciones geográfcas of the Spanish Indies, 1577–1586,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 44:3 (1964): 341–74. For a study of the Relaciones questionnaires that were issued over the course of the colonial period, see Francisco de Solano, Cuestionarios para la for-mación de las relaciones geográficas de Indias (Madrid: Editorial CSIC, 1988).

37. Two recent theses (both with the same title) explore diseases in the Relaciones: see María del Carmen Valverde Valdés, La salud y la enfermedad en las relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI (1579–1585) Thesis/disseratation (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005) and M. Genoveva Ocampo Rosales, La salud y la enfermedad en las relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI, Thesis de Maestría (Mexico DF: Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, 2005).

38. The full list of substances will be available in my book manuscript, currently under review, in which I go through the substances in more detail. In what follows here I have only included a brief description of the main materials in the pharmacopeia. In order to determine the most utilized substances, as described previously, I consulted remedy books, which listed multiple substances in the cure of different afflictions. I recorded each substance that was named and the number of times it occurred within the four sources. I did not keep track of which afflic-tion the substances were named to treat; indications below are from generalized descriptions of the substance. The list is comprised of substances that appeared seven times or more in the sources. I chose that cutoff point for several reasons: I wanted to highlight the medicines cited most frequently; I wanted to limit findings to a list of reasonably modest size; and the substances named less frequently than that were increasingly difficult to identify.

sent out throughout the colonial period, but this set is generally agreed to have been the most complete, and happened simultaneously with Hernández’s study – indeed, some of the reports mention him directly. Though these have been mined for agricultural and cartographic information, they have not, to my knowledge, been exploited for what they reveal about Nahua materia medica.37 With regard to New World medicines, the Relaciones specifically requested that colonial administrators interview locals and record information about local diseases, healing practices, and medicines used. In particular, Question #26 asked about “The herbs or aromatic plants with which the Indians cure themselves, and the medicinal or poisonous virtues in them.” Question #17 also led to information about healing substances, in that it asked, “if this land is healthy or sickly…and the illnesses that commonly occur and the remedies that are used for them.” A survey of these materials revealed a variety of medicinal substances, though not as extensive as the others. For the survey, I used the Relaciones of central Mexico – the Dioceses of Mexico, Tlaxcala, and Oaxaca, which named forty-six, thirty-one, and thirty different substances respectively (see Table 2).

Toward a Mexica pharmacopeia

Compiling a pharmacopeia from these four sources presented some significant challenges with regard to identification, nomenclature, and lack of systematization. Nevertheless, they do provide an opportunity to obtain at least a reasonable assessment and outline of the Nahua materia medica. By tallying the number of medicines cited most frequently for combating different diseases, I did not need to rely on the degree of over-lap among the sources and was able to compile a list of the top 110 most utilized sub-stances in the Nahua pharmacopeia.38 We cannot know with certainty that the medicines named in these sources were in fact the medicines in use, nor can we know how


39. Comas, “Influencia,” and “La medicina aborigen mexicana en la obra de Fray Augustín de Vetancurt (1698),” Anales de Antropología 5 (1968): 129–62.

40. In order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the 90 identifiable substances, I divided them into four main categories based largely upon their uses as foods, medicines, and craft materials; these are not Nahua categories. The first category I describe here included substances that were also part of the Mesoamerican food complex. For overviews of pre-contact cultivation and cuisine in Mesoamerica, see Robert L. Dressler, “The Pre-Columbian Cultivated Plants of Mexico,” Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University 16:6 (1953): 115–72; Donald D. Brand, “The Origin and Early Distribution of New World Cultivated Plants,” Agricultural History 13:2 (1939): 109–17; Sophie Coe, America’s First Cuisines (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); Jean Andrews, Peppers, the Domesticated Capsicums (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984); Jean Andrews, “Diffusion of Mesoamerican Food Complex to Southeastern Europe,” Geographical Review 83:2 (1993): 194–204; and Laura Caso Barrera and Mario Aliphat Fernández, “Caco, Vanilla and Annatto: Three Production and Exchange Systems in the Southern Maya Lowlands, XVI-XVII centu-ries,” Journal of Latin American Geography 5:2 (2006): 29–52. For post-conquest cuisine, see Arnold J. Bauer, “Millers and Grinders: Technology and Household Economy in Meso-America” Agricultural History Vol. 64, No. 1 (Winter, 1990), pp.1–17. Sherburne Friend Cook and Woodrow Wilson Borah, Essays in Population History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), Chapter 2, Indian Food Production and Consumption in Central Mexico before and after the Conquest (1500–1650), pp.129–77. John C. Super, Food, Conquest and Colonization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988); and John C. Super and Thomas Wright (eds.), Food, Politics, and Society in Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

41. See, for example, Mary Elizabeth Haude, “Identification of Colorants on Maps from the Early Colonial Period in New Spain,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 37:3 (1998): 240–70.

representative they were of Nahua therapeutics and medical practice or how much they were influenced by the European parameters in which they were recorded, but if these sources can be considered a reasonable approximation of what was in use, then we can know something about their pharmacopeia.

The survey revealed that the Nahua pharmacopeia included a preponderance of plant materials. Of the ninety substances I was able to identify, seventy-four were of plant origin (82%), eleven were of mineral origin (12%) and five (4.4%) were of animal ori-gin. The medicines cited most often were cohuanenepilli, “snake tongue” (also referred to as cohuapatli and as contrayerva – antidote – in Spanish) cited thirty-eight times for snake bites and scorpion sting; and cozolmecatl (also called olcacatzan) cited thirty-seven times and used to cure syphilis and “revive the dead”; followed by iyauhtli (thirty-three times), iyetl (tobacco, thirty-one times), and mecapahtli (sarsaparilla, twenty-eight times).39 The Nahua pharmacopeia contained a number of foods, including the “Mesoamerican food complex” of maize, beans, squash, and peppers first in evidence with the Olmecs; various fibers, flavorings, and ornamentals that reflected Nahua cul-ture’s love of aromatic flowers; and the “chocolate triad” of cacao, vanilla, and annatto (achiote).40 It also included a number of substances used in a range of industrial and artisanal pursuits, serving as textiles, dyes, solvents, detergents, building materials, and adhesives.41 Thus, Nahua materia medica represented the ‘biological old regime’ of

De Vos 225

42. For an account of the arts and crafts in the European/Mediterranean biological old regime, see Paula De Vos, “Apothecaries, Artists, and Artisans: Early Industrial Material Culture in the Biological Old Regime,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 45:3 (2015): 277–336.

43. Brand, “The Origins and Early Distribution,” and William Dunmire, Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods Changed America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).

44. For further discussion of these, see my book manuscript, Nature’s Craftsmen, Chapter 6.45. The main authors seeking to identify the plants described by Hernández include Ortiz de

Montellano, Juan Comas, Alfredo Lopez Austin, German Somolinos d’Ardois, Xavier Lozoya, Paul Standley, and Maximinio Martinez.

Mesoamerica, a regime that, similar to that of the Mediterranean, had built up over mil-lennia and was the product of centuries of social and agricultural development and exchange.42 Taken together, these materials and the uses to which they were put reflect the complex and varied material culture of late Post-Classic Mesoamerican society. They also serve to highlight the sophisticated state of agriculture throughout Mesoamerica and the extent to which Mesoamericans had manipulated the landscape to suit their needs.43

The plant substances of the Nahua materia medica may be divided into four major categories (see Table 3), the first consisting of the cash crops – tobacco, cacao, vanilla, rubber, and cotton – that went on to widespread cultivation, export, and profit in the global economy. The second category (see Table 4), like the first, consists of substances like guayacan bark and Mechoacan root, which achieved widespread recognition and export as medicines mainly to Europe. A third category (see Table 5) includes substances that constituted an important part of Nahua cuisine, including staple foods as well as spices and flavorings. A final category (see Table 6) consists of substances that continue to be important to modern curanderismo (the tradition of native healing), but that, for whatever reason, were not embraced in transatlantic trade.44

Questioning the Nahua pharmacopeia

As we have seen, these sources provide great opportunities but also present a number of major methodological challenges to understanding the nature of Nahua materia medica – difficulties with regard to nomenclature and identification, and difficulties related to the almost complete lack of overlap among the medicinal substances named in the differ-ent sources.45 Furthermore, they make us question the validity of relying on certain

Table 3. Cash crops in Nahua pharmacology.

Medicine #Time Nahua meaning/English name

Scientific name

Picietl, Iyetl 31 Tobacco (Arawak term), ‘Little Tobacco’

Nicotiana sp., Nicotiana rustica

Tlilxochitl – baynillas del 13 ‘Black flower,’ Vanilla orchid Epipendron vanilla

Cacahuatl 11 Cacao, chocolate Theobroma cacao

Ichcaxihuitl 7 Cotton Gossypium

Ulli, holli, ule, ullin, holquahuitl 7 Rubber tree sap (also use bark) Castilla elastic


Table 4. Important medicinal exports in Nahua pharmacology.


Scientific name

Cozolmecatl, olcacatzan 37 China Root, Palo de la vida

Smilax Mexicana, S. cordifolio, S. rotundifolia

Cohuanenepilli, coanenepilli, cohuapatli

36 Snake tongue, antidote

Passiflora jorullensis (Ortiz), Dorstenia contrayerva (Emmart, Comas), Boerhavia viscosa (León), Dorstenia contrayerva, D. brasiliensis, Asclepias setosa, Aristolochia serpentaria, Flaveria contrayerva, Bovardia jacquini, B. ternifolia, etc.

Mecapahtli, also quauhmecatli, quammecat

28 Sarsaparilla Smilax aristolochiaefolia, S. medica, S havanensis, S. mollis

Ocotzotl, also xociocotzotl, xociocotzotlquahuitl, oxitl

14 Liquidambar de Indias, pine, pine resin, turpentine, storax

Liquidambar styraciflua, Liquidambar macrophylla, Pinus oocarpa schiede ex schlechtendal

Balsamo 12 Liquidambar

Tecomahaca que se llama copalihyacmemeyalquahuitl

10 Copal; resin or gum of various trees

Elaphrium copalliferum, E. aloexylon, E. jorullense, E. trijugum, etc. or Elaphrium tecomaca

Tlallatlaquacuitlapil, tlatlanquacuitlapilli, tachuache en Tarasco

9 Mechoacan – Polvos, Raiz, Flor, Xalapa, Jalapa, Matlaliztic

Ipomea purge, Ipomea jalapa, Bryonia mechoacana, Exogonium purge

Acaxaxan, hoacaxacan 7 Guaiacan Potamegaton Mexicana (Rechii), Guaiacum lignum

Eztepatli 7 “Blood medicine” Jatropha spatulata, Croton sanguifluum, Croton cortesianus

Table 5. Important foods and flavorings in Nahua pharmacology.


Scientific name

Achiotl 12 Achiote, Annatto Bixa Orellana

Chili 20 Chile, chili, Mexican pepper Capsicum pubescens, C. frutescens, C. annuum, etc.

Metl 15 Maguey Agave, sp., Agave astrovirens, Agave Americana, Agave salmiana, A. sisalana, etc.

Mizquitl 2 Mesquite Prosopis juliflora

Nochtli 8 Nopal, prickly pear cactus and tuna

Opuntia sp., Opuntia ficus, O. vulgaris, O. engelmanii, O. tomentosa, etc.

Tlaolli – atolli de 7 Maize, dried kernels of maize; atolli

Zea mays

Tomatl, tomates, xitomate

8 Green husk tomato Lycopersicum esculentum, Solanum lycopersicum, Physalis costomatl, Saracha umbellate

Xalxocotl 7 ‘Sand plum,’ guayaba, guava Psidium guajava, Psidium pomiferum L.

De Vos 227

46. For examples of issues regarding nomenclature, see A. Pollio et al., “Continuity and Change in the Mediterranean Medical Tradition: Ruta Spp. (Rutaceae) in Hippocratic Medicine and

historical categories in our analysis, and make us realize that these categories derive from a particular context and understanding of nature, disease, and medicine that was very different from that of the Nahua.

The challenge of identifying flora using historical texts has been well documented by historians, ethnobotanists, and ethnopharmacologists and is complicated further, I would argue, by the multiple languages of Mesoamerica, Nahua naming practices, and Spanish misunderstanding.46 The sources, first of all, included names taken from various

Table 6. Important Nahua medicines not exported (often used in contemporary folk medicine).

Medicine #Time Nahua meaning/Spanish name/English name

Scientific name

Cihuapatli 12 ‘Woman’s medicine’ Montanea tomentosa, Montanea grandiflora, Eriocoma floribunda

Eztetl – stone 20 quartz or bloodstone

Iyauhtli, yauhtli, quauhyyautli

33 ‘Offered-up thing,’ absinthe, wormwood, wild incense

Tagetes lucida

Iztacpatli 14 ‘White medicine’ Prosopis juliflora, Acacia farnesiana

Iztauhyatl 16 Estasiate or Artemisia Artemisia Mexicana, Artemisia ludovicana, Artemisia filicifolia, Ambrosia artemisaefolia

Piedra bezar 18

Quauhtlepatli, cuauhtlepatli 22 ‘fire plant,’ rhododendron Euphorbia calyculata

Tlacacahuatl?, nueses de la tierra

25 ‘Earth beans/cacao beans,’ nueses de la tierra, peanuts

Tlalamatlapahtli, tlalamatla, Joan infante, de metzitlan

25

Tlalanquaye 24 Mexican pepper Piperaceae sp., Irecina calea

Tlaquatzin – cola de, agua de

15 ‘Thing that is eaten’ with honorific ‘tzin,’ opposum, lizard

Didelphis marsupialis or Didelphis virginiana


Present Practices,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 116 (2008): 469–82; as well as Tobyn Graeme et al., The Western Herbal Tradition: 2000 Years of Medicinal Plant Knowledge (London: Elsevier Science Publications, 2010); and Anne Stobart and Susan Francia (eds.), Critical Approaches to the History of Western Herbal Medicine (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Brand, “The Origin and Early Distribution,” discusses the difficulty of using linguistic (as well as historical and archeological) evidence in plant cultivation history.

47. Examples of these encyclopedias and other reference works can be found in Note 5.48. Gates, An Aztec Herbal, “Introduction,” and Vania Smith-Oka, “Traditional Medicine Among

the Nahua: Contemporary and Ancient Medicinal Plants,” FAMSI 2007. Available at: http://www.famsi.org/reports/05063/05063SmithOka01.pdf (accessed 7 February 2016).

languages. Nahua names predominated, but also included Tarascan, Zapotec, Mixtec, Otomí, and Mayan terms. In addition, Spaniards sometimes used Arawak or Taino terms from the Caribbean for the same substance they encountered on the mainland. Maize, tobacco, guava, guayacan bark (used to treat syphilis), and maguey (a type of cactus), for example, were all major components of the Nahua pharmacopeia whose names derive from the Caribbean – the Nahua term for each is very different: elotl, iyetl (or picietl), xalxocotl, acaxaxan, and metl, respectively. Spaniards also made up their own terms for things: what they called Mechoacan bark, a widely used purgative named for its area of origin, was tlatlanquacuitlapilli in Nahuatl and tachuache in Purépecha (the language of Michoacán). They also used Spanish terms for substances that resembled Mediterranean plants, adding ‘of Mexico’ or ‘of the Indies’ to the term – chili peppers were ‘Mexican pepper’. Knowledge of these practices is thus necessary to navigate among the different sources, and to date no systematic, standardized list of plants and plant names from these different sources exists, despite widespread and valuable efforts on the part of ethnobota-nists to compile encyclopedias of Mexico’s rich botanical holdings.47

For substances with Nahua names, the naming practices and agglutinative tendency of Nahuatl serves further to complicate tabulation for researchers in the sixteenth cen-tury and today. In both modern and traditional naming patterns, plant names typically included a root word describing the plant to which prefixes and/or suffixes were added to specify further characteristics.48 Prefixes included ‘tla’, meaning ‘ground’ or ‘on the ground’, as well as words for different colors. Suffixes included ‘xihuitl’ to name an herb or herbaceous plant; ‘cuahuitl’ or ‘quahuitl’ to designate a woody plant or tree; xochitl to signify a flower; ‘xocotl’ to signify fruit; and ‘acatl’ to mean a reed or cane-like plant. Ubiquitous among the plant substance names was the suffix ‘patli’ or ‘pahtli’, designating its use as a medicine (though it also meant poison). Such practices provided a logical, clear, and somewhat standardized system of naming, but different prefixes and suffixes were used interchangeably for the same substance and translitera-tion of terms not standardized, thus necessitating basic understanding of the traits of the language and hampering alphabetical collation, since several different terms could refer to the same substance. For instance, pine resin, what Spaniards called ‘liquidam-bar’, similar to Old World varieties of the same thing, was referred to interchangeably as ocotzotl, xociocotzotl, or xociocotzotlquahuitl; Mexican absinthe as iyauhtli or

http://www.famsi.org/reports/05063/05063SmithOka01.pdf

http://www.famsi.org/reports/05063/05063SmithOka01.pdf

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quauhyyautli; sarsaparilla as mecapahtli or quammecatl; and the latex-producing rub-ber tree as ulli, ullin, or holquahuitl. Thus, one plant could have many different names, depending on which prefixes or suffixes were added to the root; conversely, modern researchers have also found that one Nahua term could refer to many different species or even types of plants.

Issues of language and identification notwithstanding, perhaps the most perplexing methodological challenge in assembling the Nahua pharmacopeia – and for which a satisfactory answer remains elusive – is the lack of overlap in the medicines named by the sources. The sources together refer to several hundred different medicinal substances but share relatively few in common. Even within the Florentine Codex itself there was very little overlap between Book 10 and Book 11: out of a total of 255 different sub-stances named in the two, only twenty-one were common to both books, an overlap of less than 10% (see Table 2). This lack of overlap is also apparent when comparing Sahagún with the other sources. When both books of Sahagún were compared with the 492 different substances in the Badianus Manuscript, only 28 or about 4% of the 717 total substances were in all three sources. When these three sources (Sahagún Books 10 and 11 and the Badianus Manuscript) were compared with the 635 different indigenous substances named in Barrios – a total of 1247 different substances in the four sources combined – there were 116 (9%) common to three of the four sources, and only 17, or 1.4%, common to all four. This trend continued and was arguably even more pronounced when adding in the substances identified by local residents of Mexico, Oaxaca, and Tlaxcala in the Relaciones geográficas. The substances named in each area show rela-tively little interregional overlap (see Table 7): nine (about 10%) of the substances were found in two of the three regions, and only four (4.4%) (maguey, tobacco, sarsaparilla, and tlacopahtli) were named in all three. When the Relaciones were compared with the Badianus Manuscript, the Florentine Codex, and Barrios’s Verdadera medicina, only one substance, tobacco, was named in every source.

The lack of consistency and centralization of medicinal substances in these lists is hard to explain, especially since all of these documents were produced within a twenty-five-year period and (with the exception of Oaxaca) in roughly the same area of Mexico: the central altiplano region that constituted the heart of the Aztec Empire

Table 7. Overlap of substances in Relaciones – Mexico, Oaxaca, Tlaxcala.

Substance (n=9) In # Sources (out of 3)

Cacao 2Coanenepile 2Guaxi, guaxin, axin 2Maguey 3Picietl 3Sarzaparilla 3Tlacopatle 3Yolosuchil, yoloxochitl 2Iztacpatli 2


49. Susan Toby Evans, “Garden of the Aztec Philosopher King,” in Dan O’Brien (ed.), Gardening – Philosophy for Everyone: Cultivating Wisdom (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011) pp.207–19, p.207; Evans, “Green Evolution: A Theory-Based Perspective on the History of Designed Landscapes,” Anales de Antropología 39 (2005): 99–111; Patrizia Granziera, “Concept of the Garden in Pre-Hispanic Mexico,” Garden History 29:2 (2001): 185–213; Z. Nuttall, “The Gardens of Ancient Mexico,” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Publication 2758 (Washington, DC: United States Printing Office, 1925), pp.453–64; Dunmire, Gardens of New Spain; Susan Toby Evans and David L. Webster (eds.), Archaeology of Ancient Mexico and Central America: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2013) p.287.

50. Hernando Alvarado Tezozómac, Cronica Mexicana (Mexico: Ed. Leyenda), capitulo 40, quoted in Carlos Zolla, “La obra de Gregoio López en el Hospital de Guastepec,” in Gregorio Lopez, Tesoro de medicinas (Mexico City: Facsimile edition, Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, 1990), pp. xv–xxvi.

51. Hernando Alvarado Tezozómac, Cronica Mexicana (Mexico: Ed. Leyenda), capitulo 40, quoted in Zolla, “La obra de Gregoio López,” pp. xv–xxvi.

52. Quoted in Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Mexico, 1883–88 (San Francisco: AL Bancroft and Publishers, History Company, 1883) p.599.

and the core area of Spanish colonization efforts in the sixteenth century. This area had developed according to a shared heritage extending back to Teotihuacan and the Olmecs; its peoples had long been tied together culturally, economically, and linguis-tically, to the extent that it would not be far-fetched to assume a shared medical tradi-tion as well. In addition, Post-Classic Mesoamericans had a strong tradition of establishing cultivated gardens, and Nahua leaders employed landscape designers to establish elaborate botanical gardens in their palace complexes, gardens that encom-passed the array of plants available throughout their empire – a ‘green encyclope-dia’.49 Within this tradition, the Mexica had established what researchers describe as a thriving and extensive five-square-mile botanical garden and horticultural nursery in Huastepec, where they cultivated medicinal and ornamental plants both from the region and from tropical lowland areas and the tierra caliente. According to Hernando Alvarado Tezozómac, author of the Cronica Mexicana, the garden was established under Tlacaelel, advisor to Mexica emperors in the fifteenth century, and was “a delectable site…where there are gardens, fountains, rosebushes, and fruit trees.”50 With a natural spring that could be used for canal irrigation, Huastepec was located at a lower elevation from the Valley of Mexico; as such it was warmer and could support plants from lower and even tropical altitudes of the tierra caliente and beyond. Messengers were sent there to collect roots of such plants as cacao, vanilla, and other aromatic flowers (yoloxochitl, izquixochitl, huacalxochitl, cacahuaxochitl, and mecaxochitl) and bring them to Huastepec.51

This spectacular garden quickly came to the attention of the invading Spaniards. When Cortés encountered it on his way to Tenochtitlan, he called it “The largest, most beautiful and freshest garden ever seen.”52 After conquest, colonial authorities continued to support and exploit it for medical purposes, and Bernardino de Álvarez established the Hospital of

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53. Efrén C. del Pozo, Oaxtepec en la historia de la medicina mexicana (Mexico: UNAM Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, México, 1977); Josefine Muriel, Hospitales de la Nueva España. Tomo I. Fundaciones del siglo XVI (Mexico City: UNAM, 1990) pp.211–6; María Teresa Vuasco de Espinosa, “El Hospital de Santa Cruz de Oaxtepec: Notas Para Su Historia,” Anales (IIE63, UNAM, 1992), pp.71–97.

54. Antonio Zedillo C. et al., “Oaxtepec en la historia de la salud en México,” in López, Tesoro de Medicinas, facsimile, pp. xxix–xxxviii.

55. Cori Hayden, When Nature Goes Public. The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

56. See De Vos, “European Materia Medica.”

Santa Cruz de Huastepec there in 1568.53 The hospital and garden constituted a place for the convergence of colonial medical authorities, including Gregorio López, author of Tesoro de medicinas, who worked at the hospital for many years and composed his trea-tise there; and Juan de Barrios and Francisco Ximénez, authors of other important medical treatises, all of whom met and worked with Francisco Hernández when he visited there and was reportedly very impressed with his surroundings.54 Given this situation, it is, again, not out of the question to assume some convergence of botanical and medical knowledge would have taken place there, under the Aztecs as well as the Spanish, that would have led to a relatively codified pharmacopeia.

Despite the opportunity for centralized medical knowledge within the Aztec Empire, however, there are some possible explanations for the lack of overlap of substances. In the first place, it appears that Mexico had an abundance of medicinal plants, a situation of which colonial authorities were keenly aware early on, singling out New Spain for the searching out of miraculous medicines. Even today, ethnoecologists, ethnobotanists, and biologists argue that Mexico is one of the most biologically and ecologically diverse regions of the world.55 Hernández’s writings provide perhaps the greatest testament to this: he is said to have compiled a list of over 5,000 substances, roughly five times the amount found in a compilation of Mediterranean pharmacopeia texts.56 Although the full extent of Hernández’s lists were lost in the 1691 Escorial fire, his “culled” lists still yielded more than 3,000 substances.

In addition to the multitude of medicinal plants available in central Mexico, it appears that medical knowledge outside the Valley of Mexico (and even possibly within it) was highly localized. It is difficult to know how representative was the information from the Badianus Manuscript or the Florentine Codex of all the Nahua people, let alone those outside of the Nahua-speaking areas. Such localization is apparent in the responses to the Relaciones questions #17 and #26. When they did answer these questions, the informants for most villages identified only a few plants and indicated that those were the plants they had always used. When asked what medicinal herbs grew in the region or that they used to combat disease, many informants answered that they knew what plants they used but did not know their names. In other cases, plant names were given in Zapotec with no Nahua equivalent. In addition to difficulties with localized knowledge, problems with naming occur within the centralized areas as well, related to the characteristics of Nahuatl described above – and it is always possible that informants simply did not want to share the information asked of them.


57. I would like to acknowledge María Portuondo’s ideas and influence here. It was her com-ments upon an earlier draft of the essay that encouraged me to think in this direction. See also Sivasundaram’s discussion in “Sciences and the Global,”150–54, about the different sources consulted to gain understanding of a local botanical garden that came to serve as a model for the British imperialists; and Neil Safier’s discussion of the issue of commensurability between indigenous and Western medical traditions in the Amazon in “Global Knowledge on the Move: Itineraries, Amerindian Narratives, and Deep Histories of Science,” Isis 101 (2010): 139–41.

In fact, the very expectation that there be centralized and systematized knowledge and recording of medicinal plants throughout the region under Aztec control, and that it ought to be readily shared with foreign interlopers, may betray a Eurocentric approach to the material.57 The tradition of collecting and compiling information regarding medicinal plants, animals, and minerals has a very long history in Europe and the Mediterranean, reaching back to antiquity. The encyclopedic writings on materia medica of Dioscorides and Galen were transmitted throughout the Islamic Empires, were added to, honed, and commented upon for centuries, and reached medieval Europe as fully formed genres of medical literature – the herbal and the formulary. When Spanish colonial and medical authorities reached the Aztec and Inca Empires, this was the kind of information they sought and likely expected to find. The eliciting of information related to medicines and cures in each of the four colonial projects examined here betray an expectation that such knowledge was available and attainable, and represent enterprises by which to collect, compile, and systematize it. From what they found, it appears that indigenous communi-ties throughout central Mexico did have extensive knowledge of healing plants, but that that knowledge was highly localized. If it had been compiled in some way, perhaps it was recorded only orally; and if as a painted manuscript, those records were no doubt lost in the destruction of the pre-contact codices. But perhaps the localized knowledge had not been compiled, and perhaps what historians, anthropologists, and archeologists today refer to as Aztec gardens, and even Aztec medicines, were conceived of very differently by the Nahua. With all the promise and richness of delving into Nahua conceptions of and approaches to nature, health, and medicine, then, we must also be careful to examine critically Westernized categories and assumptions.

In this way, we see an example here of the kinds of disjunctures, interruptions, and confusions that global historians of science refer to when they discuss the challenges of investigating global sites of ‘science’ using terminology and assumptions developed in and stemming from the European context. Does this mean that we need to give up these investigations, leave aside the terminology, or disregard texts that are understood incom-pletely or that were produced within – and thus presumably ‘tainted’ by – the colonial context? To my mind, we do not, for if we do, we give up the opportunities we have to see and understand beyond a Western-centered history of science. Just because we may not have access to perfect understanding – the always elusive ideal of complete objectiv-ity – does not mean that what we find is not valuable. Disjunctures and confusions lie at the very heart of what historians do in translating the past – producing translations that can never be exact or literal but that, done thoughtfully and critically, make the past at least discernible. We may not be able to know everything the Nahua knew regarding the substances they used to aid physical afflictions, but we can know something about it.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge support from San Diego State University, which granted me a spring 2016 sabbatical, and from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a 2016 Summer Stipend. I am also very grateful to María Portuondo for her leadership in bringing this issue to fruition and for her thoughtful and intelligent encouragement and advice. Matthew Crawford provided invalu-able advice throughout various iterations of the essay and his suggestions strengthened the argu-ment in significant ways.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this article was made possible by support from San Diego State University and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Author Biography

Paula De Vos is an associate professor in the History Department at San Diego State University. Her research interests lie in the history of viceregal Mexico and the Spanish Empire, the history of pharmacology, medicine, natural history and chemistry, and the relationship between science and empire. With the support of fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, and NIH, she has published articles in Isis, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Colonial Latin American Review, and Journal of World History and served as co-editor for Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires (Stanford, 2009). She is currently preparing a book manuscript on the history of pharmacology from the ancient and medieval Mediterranean to viceregal Mexico.