Within the framework of the 44th International Book Fair of the Palacio de Minería, the Faculty of Medicine of the UNAM and the Union of Universities of Latin America and the Caribbean (UDUALC) presented the special edition of the Codex De la Cruz-Badianoqualified by specialists as the oldest jewel of ancestral medical knowledge in the American continent.
In Auditorium Six of the Palacio de Minería, Dr. Germán Fajardo Dolci, Director of the Faculty of Medicine, moderated the presentation of the so-called A pamphlet on Indian medicinal herbs (Little Book of Indian Medicinal Herbs), and explained that this first edition is made up of three books: the codex itself, the translation, and the studies on the Codex De la Cruz-Badianothat is, the analysis of its importance and its history, under the direction of Dr. Martha Eugenia Rodríguez and the teacher Nuria Galland.
For her part, Dr. Martha Eugenia Rodríguez Pérez, Head of the Faculty’s Department of History and Philosophy of Medicine, commented that the manuscript was written in 1552 by the Tlatelolca indigenous doctor Martín de la Cruz in Nahuatl and was translated into Latin by the xochimilca doctor Juan Badiano, who worked at the Colegio de la Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco; in 1902 the Codex It was transferred to the Vatican Library, discovered in 1929 by the North American researcher Charles Upson Clark and later translated from Latin into Spanish in 1964 by the priest, philologist and historian Ángel María Garibay: “It is a wonderful text, each page is a delight for its illustrations, for the text that includes the climate where the 224 plants can be planted, in addition to 185 illustrations”, he indicated.
In her opportunity, the teacher Nuria Galland Camacho, Director of the Museum of Mexican Medicine of the Palace of the School of Medicine, spoke about the adventure of making a book of the relevance of the Codex De la Cruz-Badiano, and explained that the materials selection process tried to imitate the originals, but with an avant-garde design that shows the beauty and importance of its content: “This edition pays homage to the richness of plants; we treat it like a treasure because that is it,” she pointed out.
Historian Veka Duncan stated that the Codex provides a vision of herbal medicine and medicine at that time, since “it is a document that speaks of the process of hybridization or miscegenation, which are two words that are continually questioned, but are the only ones to describe how knowledge and wisdom gradually adapted indigenous to European knowledge and wisdom, and that produces something of its own”.
For her part, Philosophy teacher Genoveva de la Peña, Director of Cencalli: Casa del Maíz y la Cultura Alimentaria, mentioned that it was through the domestic praxis of trial and error that the original inhabitants tested the effects of each plant to the degree of poisoning, and thus they made compendiums of the plants that were used to cure different illnesses.
Karen Hernandez*
*With information by Gisela Díaz Rivera and photographs by Cecilia Cruz, UDUALC.