Journal of Undergraduate Anthropology Issue V Spring 2015 Editor-in-chief Evelyn Chevere Managing Editor Table of Contents " Superstition No More: a Provisional Aztec Explanatory Model of Disease " Superstition No More: a Provisional Aztec Explanatory Model of Disease

This paper examines the 1521 epidemic that took place in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan from the point of view of medical anthropology. Based on period sources and advances in modern medical anthropology theory, this paper attempts to construct what in modern biomedical terms can be called an Aztec “explanatory model of disease” for the 1521 epidemic in the Basin of Mexico. Introduction In this paper, I will employ the method suggested by Arthur Kleinman and others, known as the “Explanatory Model of disease” to examine the Aztec understanding of the epidemics introduced by the Spanish conquistadors. In particular, I will address the epidemic that devastated the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1521. The theoretical perspective employed here allows for a restructuring of the basic questions which modern scholars use in their approach to the topic of early contact period epidemiology. Instead of analyzing the number of those who were affected with various diseases or the biomedical cause for their demise, a qualitative analysis of the sickness would allow a more profound understanding of how the people themselves saw and explained their sickness. A qualitative study of the curative methods of the Aztec medical tradition would allow for a deepened understanding of how and why the Aztecs applied certain remedies and not others when afflicted by disease. I will begin with a brief historiographic survey of the study of early-contact period epidemiology and highlight the existing interpretations of this phenomenon. Having done this, I will examine the theoretical background of present-day medical anthropology, which examines the ways in which various cultures experience and explain illness. Lastly, I will attempt to construct an explanatory model of disease drawing from a qualitative analysis of Nahuatl medical practices as presented in surviving period documents. Employing a qualitative mode of analysis like the explanatory model approach will hopefully open the door for a reinterpretation of the gathered knowledge from extant primary sources and shift the mode of inquiry from, what I see as, an obsession with the number of those who died after contact with the Spaniards from various causes and the meticulous biomedical identification of those causes to attempting to ascertain what it was that the indigenous population thought happened that caused them to die. The explanatory model approach will hopefully break through the simple explanation that the natives’ beliefs are “superstition” and “devilry’ as they were written off by the Spanish observers during the early colonial period. Instead, the model I attempt to construct below will hopefully Journal of Undergraduate Anthropology 8 make it clear that there is no aura of superstition surrounding the indigenous curative methods, that instead, both the explanations for sickness and the cures employed to remedy them are rational and intimately connected to one another. Problems of Historiography After the formal seizure of power by the Spanish crown, the health of the indigenous population remained perilous. The 1521 epidemic proved to be neither the last nor the most serious of the calamities that befell the Basin of Mexico in the 16 century. In a seminal essay, Prem (1991) identifies a total of ten epidemics of what appear to have been Western diseases introduced into the New World after the arrival of the Conquistadors. Among the causes of these epidemics are smallpox, measles, typhus, and mumps (Prem 1991). All these outbreaks occurred within a period of roughly 20-30 years, effectively ensuring that there was not a single year in the period between 1520 and 1600 that there was not some sort of major sickness ravaging indigenous communities in the Mexico basin. Since its publication, Prem’s work has influenced a number of anthropologists and historians of medicine to undertake inquiries into the character of new world epidemics. A major contribution to the field has been the introduction of the concept of Virgin Soil epidemics which suggests that the reason for the extent of the depopulation of the Mexico basin was the absence of inborn immunity to introduced European diseases among the native people of the Americas (Borah 1991). Scholars’ wide acceptance of the Virgin Soil theory has conditioned the state of the present scholarship in the field. Most recent anthropological and historical work has focused on the question of population decline and current scholarship is quantitative in nature, attempting to establish the number of victims who succumbed to the epidemic, as well as the number of people living in the Basin of Mexico on the eve of European contact. Lovell attempts to construct a model of native depopulation and estimates roughly 50 million casualties in the period of 15181580. The reason for the heavy prevalence of numerical data regarding mortality is in part a consequence of the condition of the primary sources from which population information can be drawn. The earliest period of European-American contact was not one where a census-type venture was undertaken. Instead, a system of encomiendas was prevalent. Encomiendas were land tracts entrusted to Spanish officers in the new world who, in return for “instruction in the true faith and wages” would be entitled to the labor of all constituent natives (Sanderlin, 1992). In many parts of modern Mexico, the new Spanish overlords elected to have their newly acquired native serf-like servants to work in the mines to extract gold from New World reserves for European markets. Much of the record that survives to this day talks about the number of laborers who died in any particular period in the mining operations and the number brought in to replace them. Such a picture is by no means exhaustively complete, and at best circumstantial. Nonetheless, it allows analysts to construct prognoses and approximations of the probable overall number of people living in New Spain within one or two generations of the conquest. While an invaluable source of information on some aspects of Aztec daily life, indigenous and indigenous-informed sources like Sahagun’s General History of the Things of New Spain are not Journal of Undergraduate Anthropology 9 particularly helpful in this regard either. Although statements like, “the epidemic lasted more than 60 days in Tenochtitlan” and “more than half the people died there [Tepeilhuitl]” can give researchers an indirect testament to the seriousness of a given epidemic, they are practically useless in determining precisely how much “half the people” would be (Sahagun 1982:81). In general terms, the preoccupation of both the colonial bureaucrats and modern scholars with mere figures is unnerving. A quantitative analysis at its core is a report of what happened. The qualitative explanatory model approach that I will attempt to construct counteracts this trend of outsider indifference. Instead, it is appropriate to pose the question: what did the people think was happening? The best way to answer this question is to focus on the methods indigenous medical professionals used at the time. Such an approach is justified because every medical system at its core must be rational and logical. That is to say that the curative method is intimately tied with the understanding of how the disease itself works within the patient’s body and what exactly is happening as a result of said disease. However, while all medical treatment systems are logical, it might be difficult to rationalize them from the point of view of what can be colloquially termed “Western medicine. ” Naturally, those 16 century medical professionals who assembled the early colonial compendia of treatments had difficulties of rationalization. The fact that these late-medieval/early modern conceptions of disease differ rather drastically from our modern disease-related epistemology adds to the difficulty of understanding the extant primary sources, as they are effectively doubly removed from the observed fact. In the first step, the (usually European-educated) chronicler would attempt to rationalize the native medical practices in terms of canonical Western medicine of the late Middle Ages; in the second iteration the modern professional attempts to translate the late-medieval interpretation into the modern biomedical one, while remaining true to the indigenous original. This circumstance necessarily makes almost all available information to some degree dubious. Problems of Biomedicine Given the difficulties described above, I have attempted to circumvent the question of numbers altogether. Instead, the aim of the present project is to attempt a qualitative analysis. A qualitative analysis has not yet been attempted. This is due in no small part to the problems posed by the extant historical material outlined above. However, a new perspective on what is available would allow, at least in part, for a termination of projection of modern ideologies on to the past. Such an approach poses its own set of difficulties, not the least of which, paradoxically, is that I attempt to superimpose the standards and categories of modern medical anthropology onto a set of events that are culturally and temporally bounded in a completely different medical and philosophical tradition. In this section, I will attempt to flesh out these nuances. In effect, this work in itself is an attempt to explain the problems of the past in modern terms. Unlike all the research done to date, I hope to at least illuminate the possibility for a superimposition that takes into account cultural, ideological, and social factors that have, to this point, been largely ignored in disciplines outside anthropology. Journal of Undergraduate Anthropology 10 One of the most important things that modern medical anthropology attempts to do is conceptualize the ailments of different patients within their own socio-cultural contexts. Toward this end, specialists have proposed a metho