Aztec Illness, Healing and Care

In Late Postclassic central Mexico, c.1300–1521, illness and injury brought together household care, specialist knowledge and ritual action. The Mexica were one Nahua-speaking people; their rulers led the Triple Alliance, formed in 1428. Tenochtitlan, their island capital, stood on the site of today’s Mexico City. The surviving medical accounts were written after the Spanish conquest, when Nahua practitioners and scholars worked within colonial institutions.

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Colonial records of healing

Two sixteenth-century works preserve different kinds of medical knowledge. In 1552, the Nahua physician Martín de la Cruz composed an illustrated herbal in Nahuatl; Juan Badiano, a Nahua scholar, translated it into Latin. Now commonly called the Badianus manuscript, it pairs medicinal-plant images with descriptions of their uses.

Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan friar, worked with Nahua elders, authors and artists on the Florentine Codex, completed in 1577 at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, now part of Mexico City. Its parallel Nahuatl and Spanish texts describe people, bodily conditions and plants. Book X discusses healers and illnesses; Book XI includes plants and their uses. The compilation took shape within a Franciscan colonial institution.

Healers, diagnosis and their written record

The Nahuatl word ticitl could refer to a healer, physician, midwife or prognosticator. Book X describes a good physician as experienced in examining people and knowledgeable about herbs, roots, trees and stones. Its account connects that knowledge to practical work: setting bones, applying splints, making incisions and stitching wounds. The description presents the qualities of a skilled practitioner, not a roster of every treatment used in each case.

Book X describes diagnosis through casting maize kernels and reading reflections in water. Both language columns call the woman who performs these acts a “bad physician”; the Spanish text also labels the practices sorcery and deceit.

At the end of its medicinal-plant section, Book XI names experienced healers from Santiago Tlatelolco and says they treated people publicly. The account adds that they asked a scribe to write down their names because they could not write themselves. It names Gaspar Matías, Pedro de Santiago, Francisco Simón, Miguel Damián and others. Their note connects the herbal material with practitioners working in named neighborhoods of the colonial city.

Treating wounds and setting a fracture

For a head wound, Book X records a practical sequence. The text says to wash away the blood with hot urine, squeeze hot maguey, or agave, sap onto the injured place, then apply more sap mixed with the plant called matlalxihuitl, soot and salt. The wound is quickly wrapped to keep air from it; the text says to repeat the preparation if the flesh is inflamed.

A separate Book X passage lays out fracture care. The practitioner pulls the broken bone and sets it back into position, applies a ground root, then fits wooden splints around the limb and ties them firmly in place. If the flesh around it swells, the text describes lancing it or using another ground-root preparation. Book XI adds a paste-like dressing, or poultice, made by grinding leaves with other plants and mixing them with pine resin; it is applied after the bone is set. Together, the passages show the sequence of examining an injury, preparing substances and holding the limb still.

The temazcalli in recovery and childbirth

A temazcalli, literally a “house of vapor,” was a bath chamber heated to produce steam. A Codex Tudela illustration shows a rectangular chamber with a nearby furnace heating one wall; attendants threw water onto the hot wall to make steam. The Florentine Codex describes firewood that heats the bath without smoke, and connects bathing with recovery from illness and care around childbirth.

In one childbirth scene, the pregnant woman’s mother and female relatives urge the midwife to help. The midwife lights the bath fire, places the woman inside and massages her abdomen. Another passage describes bathing after birth. These accounts show the work involved in preparing the heated space and the roles of relatives and midwife during care.

For related household roles, see households. For the wider setting, see Daily Life in the Aztec World.