Pope Sends Hemisphere’s 1st Medical Text to Mexico

Curanderos no longer recommend drinking jaguar blood for strength, but the medicine men still use herbs to induce abortions.

The prescriptions and procedures are in the first known book of medicine written in North or South America. The book has returned to Mexico after more than 400 years, a gift of Pope John Paul II.

“It is very important because it provides a series of prescriptions that allow us to study indigenous medicines,” said Dr. Carlos Viesca, a professor of history and medicine at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Viesca is the nation’s leading authority on the 140-page book, which bears the title “Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis” but is commonly known as the Badiano Manuscript.

In it are lists of ailments, treatments used by central Mexico’s indigenous population and illustrations of 185 plants. Viesca said modern-day curanderos still use 90% of the plants as medicines.

Martin de la Cruz, an Indian doctor at the College of Santa Cruz at Tlatelolco, wrote the manuscript in the Nahuatl language in 1552, and Juan Badiano translated it into Latin. Little else is known of the two men.

Francisco de Mendoza, the son of New Spain’s first viceroy, commissioned the volume as a gift for King Charles I of Spain, who eventually gave it to one of his librarians.

It was sold to Cardinal Francisco Barberini of Rome, who kept it until his death in 1902, then went to the Vatican library, to be forgotten until two researchers discovered it 27 years later.

Besides chronicling indigenous cures, Viesca said, the book “could be used as a model to study traditional medicine to see how much has been maintained, how much has been lost and how much has been integrated” into modern medicine.

Some plants described in it have effective medicinal properties and about 10% have been studied by modern scientists, he said.

Yolloxochetl, related to the magnolia, functions as a heart stimulant much like the drug digitalis, Viesca said in an interview. Cihuapatli has been found to induce labor, menstruation and abortions.

Many religious-magical aspects of the treatments have passed out of vogue, he said.

Before the Spanish came, curanderos called for divine intervention and recommended feasting on the bones, bile, organs and blood of animals. Viesca said jaguar blood was believed to bring extraordinary physical strength.

John Paul returned the book after President Carlos Salinas de Gortari mentioned it during the Pope’s visit to Mexico in May.

A copy is on display at the National Museum of Anthropology, but the original is permanently stored to prevent further damage from light or temperature variations.