Beyond Sacrifice: Aztec Medicine and Healing

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The Aztecs are famous as conquerors, as sometime cannibals, and as, eventually, the conquered of an expanding European empire. This episode goes beyond human sacrifice to look at how Aztec beliefs about the body, religion, and nature were reflected in their practices of medicine and healing. Dismissed as sorcerers by some Spanish observers, physicians were significant to Aztec culture, and active in providing healing, surgery, and preventative care.
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Podcaster: Lucy

Further Reading

Manuel Aguilar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, Oxford University Press, (2007). 

David Carrasco, The Aztecs: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, (2012).

Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. 

Millie Gimmel, “Reading Medicine in the Codex de la Cruz Badiano”, Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (2008): 169-92.

Patrizia Granziera, “Gardens and public parks in Cuernavaca: transformations of a cultural landscape.” Landscape History 38:2 (2017): 97-108.

Francisco Guerra, “Aztec Medicine,” Medical History 10 (1966): 315-338.

James Maffie, “Teotl as Olin,” in: Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion, University Press of Colorado, (2014): 185-260. 

NAHUATLAHTOLLI [language course].

Sylvie Peperstraete, “Representing the Human Body in Postclassic Central Mexico: A Study of Proportions and Their Evolution in the Aztec Pictorial Tradition,” in: Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands: Gods, Ancestors, and Human Beings, University Press of Colorado, (2020).

Michael E. Smith, The Aztecs, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., (2011).

Eliseo “Cheo” Torres and Timothy L. Sawyer, Healing with Herbs and Rituals: A Mexican Tradition, University of New Mexico Press, (2014). 

Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin Macleod (www.incompetech.com)