Part I: Five Centuries of Healing
¿Qué mágicas infusiones
de indios herbolarios
de mi patria, entre mis letras
el hechizo derramaron? What are these magical infusions
of the Indian herbalists of my homeland,
that spill enchantment
over my pages?
-- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695)
Traditional Mexican-American medicine is un rico menudo, a rich stew, with a long list of ingredients: sixteenth-century Arab and European herbal medicines, ideas that date back to Hippocrates, twentieth-century patent medicines, plant medicines from Africa, herbal wisdom from North American native tribes. But the key ingredient is as old as Mesoamerica -- the living legacy of the Aztecs, remnants of a vast treasury of herbal knowledge that has nearly vanished.
War Of The Worlds
When Hernando Cortés and his 553 men landed at Vera Cruz in 1519, they came face-to-face with a culture so vastly different from the one they had left in Europe, it was as though they had traveled by spaceship to a distant galaxy. The people of the Aztec empire viewed reality from a perspective that was almost incomprehensible to the Spanish. And the Aztecs were equally confounded by the Spaniards, whom they regarded as half gods, half monsters.
It could be argued that the more advanced culture lost the war, that the Spanish did not bring civilization to the New World but effectively demolished it. The Aztecs reigned for little more than a century, but during those decades, through constant warfare that expanded the boundaries of the empire from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific and trade routes that extended south through Honduras and Nicaragua, they acquired much of the collective knowledge of all the Mesoamerican peoples, inheriting the cultures of the Toltec, the Zapotec, the Mixtec, the Huaxtec, the Maya.
They were extraordinary astronomers who had developed a yearly calendar accurate within eleven minutes, and charted the movements of the stars, using only their own eyes to scan the skies. They were advanced mathematicians, spectacular craftsmen, accomplished architects and engineers. The Aztecs were artists -- musicians, painters, sculptors, dancers. All members of the elite classes were poets. They valued skill with words as highly as skill with weapons and considered both to be necessary attributes. Vast libraries housed exquisitely painted fanlike volumes of fig-bark paper in which they recorded their philosophy, history, religion, literature, law, and scientific findings.
The conquistadors, marching into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, were so overwhelmed by its splendor that they asked one another if they were dreaming. Crossing a wide causeway they entered a city of vast plazas, fountains, sculpture, and architecture of heroic proportions brightly decorated with colorful murals and glyphs. Floating gardens swayed in the lagoon. Flowering vines cascaded over the terraces of the townhouses. In one of his historic long letters to the king of Spain, Cortés expressed fear that no one would believe his description of a city so full of wonder that even the conquistadors themselves could hardly grasp what they were seeing. It has been called the Venice of the Americas because, like Venice, it was a magnificent city built on a series of canals. But it was more beautiful than Venice in one very important aspect: It was clean. So clean that a Spanish chronicler remarked that walking its streets he was "in no more danger of soiling his feet than he was of soiling his hands." A thousand workers washed and swept the streets and plazas each day. Clean water was brought into the city through aqueducts. Human waste was picked up from the houses daily, and public toilet facilities were placed at intervals along the great causeways that led into the city.
The Aztecs were meticulously clean in their person as well. They were offended by body odor, bathed daily, and used herbal deodorants and breath fresheners. Middle-class houses had private bathrooms, and there were public bathhouses throughout the city. Motecuhzoma II had more than a hundred bathrooms in his vast palace. He reportedly bathed and changed his clothes several times a day, never wearing a garment more than once.
The great capitals of Europe at that time, and for centuries afterward, were full of filth and misery. The rat-infested alleys were strewn with garbage and human waste. Chamber pots were emptied onto the streets, and clean running water was not even conceived of. The old adage that a man takes three baths in his lifetime, one at birth, one on his wedding day, and the last when he is a corpse about to be buried, was not far from the truth. The Spanish conquistadors were impressed that the Mexicans always greeted them by fumigating them with incense, which they took as a great honor. But we can only imagine what these men, unwashed and sweating in their heavy clothing and armor, must have smelled like to their fastidious hosts.
The Aztecs and the Spanish viewed one another with horror and awe, and each saw the face of a barbarian.
The Glory of the Ancient Gardens
If their civilization had not been destroyed during the conquest, the Aztecs, like the Chinese, might have made a great contribution to the world through their vast and ancient knowledge of herbal medicine. Within its borders, Mexico has arguably the greatest variety of plant life on earth. Its geography includes rugged mountain ranges and lush valleys, tropical jungles on the Caribbean coast and arid deserts that stretch to the Pacific in the north. The Aztecs had survived centuries of wandering from one terrain to another before founding their capital at Tenochtitlán. They had, of necessity, become expert botanists during their travels, forced to use whatever they could find growing around them for both food and medicine.
As the empire prospered, they became magnificent horticulturalists. In 1467 the great Motecuhzoma's grandfather, Motecuhzoma I, established an immense botanical garden at Huaxtepec, which his grandson later revived. It may well have been the first botanical garden on earth, and the most extensive collection of plants the world had ever seen. Trees, shrubs, herbs, and flowers were imported from all over the empire, along with gardeners trained in tending them. There were nearly two thousand varieties of plants in the garden -- fruit trees, orchids from the tropics, stands of ahuehuete cypress -- all artfully arranged to provide pleasure to the senses and planted for fragrance and color, light and shade. Pools, waterfalls, fountains, an aviary full of colorful exotic birds, and a zoo graced the grounds.
Although the garden at Huaxtepec was the largest in the empire, Motecuhzoma II also maintained a luxuriant garden at his palace in Tenochtitlán, another just outside the capital in the hills of Chapultepec, and yet another at the suburban palace in Ixtapalapa. In the allied state of Texcoco, the great "poet king," Nezahualcóyotl, maintained a glorious garden of his own. The Texcocan king was devoted to the study of plants and commissioned artists to paint examples of the various species for his library.
In all these gardens, medicinal plants were cultivated and studied. Aztec doctors used the gardens as laboratories, conducting experiments subsidized by the nobility and by the imperial government. The medicinal plants grown in the gardens were intended for the medical needs of the nobility, but commoners were invited to be treated at the gardens free of charge, in exchange for reporting the results to the medical researchers who practiced there.
Basic knowledge of herbal medicine was common. Nearly every family grew its own herbs and vegetables in a garden called xochichinancalli, literally "flower