Smallpox in the Sixteenth-Century Americas: Evidence from the Florentine Codex
Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España [Códice florentino / The Florentine Codex]. [México]: [Secretaría de Gobernación], [1979]. Rare and Distinctive Collections, CU Boulder Libraries.
The Florentine Codex is a sixteenth-century ethnographic research study in Spanish and Nahuatl by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. He wrote this in partnership with Nahua men who were former students of his. Early cases of smallpox in central Mexico during the 1520s had a devastating effect, as they arrived among populations with no immunity, producing a “virgin soil epidemic” (Snowden, 2019, 101-02). Smallpox was described with a definition of “being an acute contagious disease caused by the variola virus” (World Health Organization n.d). It is said to give you a fever and red bumps that look like blisters over the whole body.
The Florentine Codex shows an image of someone who looks to be in pain with what appear to be dots from the small pox all over their body (Sahagún, 1577). Sahagún had the motivation to write this piece because of many reasons. One of those reasons was the goal of evangelizing the indigenous Mesoamerican people. H.B Nicholson says his writings were devoted to this. He described this work as an explanation of the “divine, or rather idolatrous, human, and natural things of new Spain” (Nicholson 2002, 46). He also had motivation in the sense of explaining indigenous religion, beliefs, and practices. Another reason for this research was to create a vocabulary of the Aztec language. Sahagún researched, edited, and revised his work for many decades. He made many different versions of this so that he could address many religions and then sent his work over to the royal court of Spain and the Vatican in the late sixteenth century to explain Aztec culture. Sahagún created this through twelve sections: the gods, the ceremonies, the origins of the gods, the soothsayers, the omens, rhetoric and moral philosophy, the sun moon and stars and the binding of the years, kings and lords, the merchants, the people, earthly things, and the conquest. Throughout research, researchers find a discrepancy between the Nahuatl text and the Spanish text (Terraciano 2010, 9). Robert McCaa talks about the military presence and how large it was; he states “the military significance of the pestilence was enormous”(McCaa 1995, 22). He talks about this because of the huge population decline in 1520, the population decreased by anywhere from 30 to 50 percent, a decrease that went from 25.3 million in 1519 to 2.7 million in 1568. By 1650 this had caused the population to decrease to just 1.7 million which makes it a 93% decrease in population (Koch et al. 2019, p. 11).
In comparison, from the Wellcome Collection, the 1950s image Vaccination of Babies Against Smallpox: a Message from the British Chief Medical Officer shows a difference from the 1520s outbreak (Wellcome Collection 1950). It is an image that is trying to convince people to get their children vaccinated by saying “VACCINATION of all healthy babies must be our aim if we are to protect the community against a return of SMALLPOX.” This image is different from the Florentine Codex because they had the vaccination for this and were pushing it to the people to stop the spread of smallpox. During the period in which the Florentine Codex was written, they were hit with this wave that was brought over by the Spanish and had no way of curing it at the beginning, it was so new. It was the same smallpox we had seen in 1519 and 1520, but it was in a much different time period with much more advanced technology. The assumption can be made that the Florentine Codex helped with this advancement. They had experienced it and written about it so many years in advance that it had the opportunity to be studied and worked on so they had this opportunity to give the people a vaccine. The 1950s was a time of widespread immunization for smallpox. In Europe during the 1950s it was no longer an epidemic with the large groups of immune people, it still managed to cause isolation. According to Ramond Gani and Steve Leach, “the outbreak went unrecognized until the second generation of infection” (Gani and Leach 2001). This caused 95% of the public to get the vaccination. The main idea I was able to get from the comparisons of was that the Aztecs and the careful account of the disease in the Florentine Codex paved a way and provided improvement for the future generations when it came to stopping the outbreak of a disease, especially smallpox.
- Anonymous, Fall '22
The Florentine Codex is divided into twelve books by thematic areas and includes more than 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the XVI century. This illustration was drawn from the sixteenth-century Florentine Codex, Book XII (compiled between 1540 and 1585), which shows the Nahuas of conquest-era central Mexico suffering from smallpox (Fenn, 2003). As we can see, this image shows a person sick with smallpox being treated by a doctor. It is a clear representation of the catastrophic pandemic that the Nahuas suffered. A doctor is trying to help the patient, who is completely covered with smallpox all over their body and bedridden.
A comparison with the image of the Florentine Codex on smallpox that I chose for my exhibition is an images from the Wellcome Collection. I specifically I chose an image of smallpox, taking into account that it has been a disease that has been around for many centuries. In the image of the Florentine Codex we can see a smallpox patient with the doctor, who is trying to help the patient, with an unknown medicine. Comparing the image of the Wellcome Collection, we can see something similar, that is a person sick with smallpox, with pox all over his skin. We also also see signs of medicine, only that, in this case, it is in the form of a vaccine that continues to serve us even in our times. So with that we can see the great impact that this disease had on our history from century to century. These images were created with a specific audience in mind: the first image of the Florentine Codex was made by the Nahuas and the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún in the sixteenth century tells us of their history and what they faced; the second image, held by the Wellcome Collection, was created to influence other people to get vaccinated (especially Hispanics since it is written in Spanish) and thus be able to minimize the spread of smallpox.
- Anonymous, Fall '22
Historia General de las Cosas Nueva España (Florentine Codex) was written by Fray Bernardino de Sahagun and Nahua artists and researchers in the sixteenth century. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer. The medium that was used to create this images in the Codex was watercolor. An image from Book Twelve of the Codex (seen above right) is a clear depiction and visualization of Smallpox and how it attacked the people of Tenochtitlan (Fitzgerald). In this image, a doctor is treating a patient who is covered in bumps, and you can see that the doctor appears to be talking or breathing because they are expelling something out of their mouths. In the following images you can see that the patient’s bumps progressively get worse and worse, and “spread everywhere, on one’s face, on one’s head, on one’s breasts, etc” , as well as the overall condition of their health (What Happened to the Native Population After 1492). In the second image, you can also see that the patient is also expelling something out of their mouths, maybe hinting that the artist who created this image believed that that could be a part of how Smallpox spreads. This image can mean a lot, but I think what it means, and what the iconography signifies, is the horror that Smallpox was, especially the significance of the pustules that formed, “The disease was immediately identifiable by the pustules, lesions or boils” (Smallpox in the New World), and the havoc that it wreaked on these peoples bodies.
A second illustration (seen above left) from Book One of the Florentine Codex, shows the sacred festivital in the Tenochtitlan community during the Tepeilhuitl or “The Festival of the Mountains' (Fitzgerald; Library of Congress). Smallpox attacked Tenochtitlan during this time. Coincidentally, it was a festival to remember their dead relatives through communal feasting, song and dance.
- Katie Goetz, Spring '23