Source / Illustrated medical manuscript
Completed at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco on 22 July 1552, the manuscript titled Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis records remedies associated with the Nahua physician Martín de la Cruz in a Latin translation made by the Nahua scholar Juan Badiano.
Its importance is not that it preserves pre-conquest medicine unchanged or proves that particular remedies worked. It shows Nahua medical, linguistic and pictorial knowledge being selected and recast for a Spanish court within the unequal institutions and commercial ambitions of early colonial New Spain.
What the manuscript contains
The entries usually begin with a complaint, name ingredients, and direct their preparation or application. Plants dominate the images, but the recipes also call for animal products, minerals, earths and procedures such as grinding, boiling, bathing, drinking and anointing. “Herbal” is convenient shorthand; it does not describe the whole materia medica.
The first eight chapters move broadly from head, eyes, ears and teeth through the chest, abdomen, limbs and feet. Later chapters address conditions attributed to heat or cold, women's reproductive health and childbirth, childhood illness, and signs of a person nearing death. This head-to-foot order resembles a widespread book-making convention, while the particular categories and remedies require interpretation within sixteenth-century Nahua thought.
Nahuatl names written above the painted plants preserve linguistic evidence that Badiano did not simply replace with Latin labels. The pictures often emphasise roots, flowers, growth form and the ground or water associated with a plant. The Latin prose identifies the complaint and preparation. None of these layers alone guarantees a modern species identification.
The manuscript names De la Cruz and Badiano, but not its painters, scribes, plant collectors, ingredient preparers or the patients and practitioners whose experience may underlie its prescriptions. Jennifer R. Saracino's studies of artistic production at the college argue for reading such works through collective Indigenous labour rather than the modern idea of a solitary author-artist.
The text records treatments considered worth presenting; it is not a case register, controlled comparison or record of how often a remedy succeeded. Patient voices, dosage standardisation, adverse effects and follow-up are usually unavailable. Historical inclusion therefore cannot establish present-day safety or efficacy.
Tlatelolco, translation and patronage
Franciscans founded the Colegio de Santa Cruz in 1536 to educate sons of the Nahua nobility in Latin, Christian doctrine and learned disciplines. The manuscript was finished only thirty-one years after the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and seven years after the devastating epidemic of 1545. Those conditions matter: the college supported Indigenous scholarship while also serving conversion and colonial government.
The opening calls Martín de la Cruz an Indigenous physician of the college and presents him as the work's composer; Badiano's colophon calls himself a native of Xochimilco and a reader at the college who put the book into Latin. Using these statements with viceregal records, historian Carlos Viesca established that De la Cruz was a Tlatelolca noble who cared for the college's pupils, correcting unsupported claims that both men were physicians from Xochimilco. Beyond such documentary fragments, their biographies remain uncertain.
Badiano says he translated at the direction of the Franciscan Jacobo de Grado, while De la Cruz's dedication addresses Francisco de Mendoza, son of the first viceroy. No separate Nahuatl draft is known to survive. Latin made the remedies legible and prestigious at court, but the passage from spoken or written Nahuatl into a European learned genre inevitably selected, rearranged and sometimes obscured concepts.
The volume was prepared for Francisco de Mendoza and carried to Spain for presentation to the crown. Scholars have connected the project both to efforts to restore royal support for the financially troubled college and to Mendoza's pursuit of privileges for cultivating and trading New Spanish medicinal products. The precise balance of those purposes is debated, but the book's luxury appearance and useful substances made Indigenous knowledge into an argument for patronage and potential profit.
How to read its medicine
The makers worked within living Nahua medical and pictorial traditions, yet the extant object was produced after conquest in a Franciscan college, on European paper, in Latin, for a colonial patron. Christian, classical and European medical language appears beside Indigenous names and visual conventions. Calling the result simply “Aztec medicine” flattens both the violence of colonisation and the creative choices of Nahua intellectuals.
Head pain, fatigue, fever, skin lesions, reproductive complaints and other headings describe symptoms or historically defined conditions, not necessarily the diseases a present-day clinician would diagnose. Translators may make an old label sound more precise than it was. The remedies should be analysed with the text's concepts of bodies, environments and causation rather than silently converted into modern categories.
Separate chapters treat menstruation, childbirth, lactation, postpartum complaints and childhood conditions. Their presence broadens the manuscript's medical scope, but it does not tell us who provided day-to-day reproductive care, whether women supplied the knowledge, how patients consented, or what outcomes followed. The courtly manuscript preserves its compilers' presentation of care, not a complete social history of it.
Modern botanists compare Nahuatl names, pictures, habitat signs, distribution and later ethnobotanical reports, but proposed identifications often conflict. A 2023 comparison of the codex with current medicinal-plant reports found few exact continuities of use and stressed five centuries of social, ecological and medical change. Even a convincing species match does not validate a historical preparation, dose or indication.
Production, custody and recovery
1536–1552: the Colegio de Santa Cruz opened at Tlatelolco in 1536. De la Cruz composed or dictated the medical material, Badiano translated it into Latin, and unnamed collaborators made the painted volume. The colophon dates completion to the feast of Mary Magdalene, 22 July 1552.
1552 and after: Francisco de Mendoza took the manuscript to Spain for the royal court. Accounts often place it immediately in the royal library or El Escorial, but the detailed chain of possession is not continuous enough to treat every transfer as certain.
By 1626: an ownership inscription connects the book to Diego de Cortavila y Sanabria, an apothecary to Philip IV. During Cardinal Francesco Barberini's Spanish legation in 1626 it passed into Barberini hands. A seventeenth-century copy made in the circle of Cassiano dal Pozzo's “Paper Museum,” now in the Royal Library at Windsor, demonstrates limited learned circulation in Rome without proving broad medical adoption.
1902–1940: the Barberini library entered the Vatican Library in 1902. Charles Upson Clark drew scholarly attention to the manuscript in 1929; saying that he “discovered” it exaggerates a modern research encounter into an act of creation. William Gates issued an English version in 1939, and Emily Walcott Emmart's 1940 colour facsimile, Latin transcription, translation and commentary made the manuscript far more accessible. Her title, The Badianus Manuscript, also helped centre the translator's name over De la Cruz's authorship.
1990–present: Pope John Paul II returned the manuscript to Mexico, where a public presentation was held at the Museo Nacional de Antropología on 15 July 1990. The holding institution's current catalogue instead dates the return to 1991, and Viesca's 1995 article says mid-1992; the documentary record therefore supports describing a return process rather than concealing the inconsistent dates. The original is now conserved by the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, whose digital presentation allows its pages to be studied without equating access with ownership.
Historical significance
It is often called the first medical book or first herbal of the Americas. A safer description is the earliest surviving illustrated manuscript devoted specifically to Nahua medicines and medicinal plants that is known to have been made in the Americas. “Surviving” and “known” matter because conquest destroyed or dispersed Indigenous records and because medical knowledge also travelled orally, through practice and in forms European collectors did not preserve.
The book documents names, materials, environments, bodily categories, techniques of preparation, visual analysis, translation and patronage. Laboratory investigation of selected plants can answer modern pharmacological questions, but it cannot recover the manuscript's entire medical world or retroactively turn it into a modern formulary.
“Badianus Manuscript” recalls the Latin translator and twentieth-century edition; “De la Cruz-Badiano Codex” restores the named composer without erasing Badiano's intellectual work. Neither title recovers the unnamed painters, collectors, practitioners or patients. Responsible credit therefore begins with the names in the manuscript and keeps the missing contributors visible.
Across the collection
Connect Indigenous knowledge to colonial exchange, extraction, epidemic disease, migration and public health.
Follow plants through naming, illustration, collecting, trade, experiment and pharmaceutical development.
Compare how images made bodies, plants, instruments and observations persuasive.
References
Selections from Emily Walcott Emmart's The Badianus Manuscript (Codex Barberini, Latin 241): An Aztec Herbal of 1552. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1940. The digital gallery provides facsimile pages, Latin transcription and English translation; it is a modern edition of the primary source, not the lost Nahuatl wording.
The holding institution's digital presentation, manuscript history and complete sequence of colour pages. Its return date of 1991 differs from records of the July 1990 public presentation.
Antropología: Revista Interdisciplinaria del INAH 30, pp. 75–90. Speeches and photographs from the presentation at the Museo Nacional de Antropología on 15 July 1990. Useful as primary evidence for the ceremony, but not as a neutral account of the codex's entire custody history.
Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 25 (1995): 479–498. An archival reconstruction of De la Cruz's identity, work at the college, the named roles in the manuscript and the circumstances of patronage; the author labels several biographical conclusions as conjectural.
In Nicholas B. Miller and Ulrike Lindner, eds., Plantation Knowledge: Agricultural Colonization, Exploitation, and Exchange Since 1500. SUNY Press, 2025, pp. 57–83. DOI: 10.1515/9798855803808. A peer-reviewed, open-access study of art, land, labour, economic botany and the extraction of Nahua knowledge.
Boletín Latinoamericano y del Caribe de Plantas Medicinales y Aromáticas 20, no. 1 (2021): 1–27. Review of the manuscript's structure, history, botany and selected pharmacological investigations, while identifying European as well as Indigenous elements in the remedies.
Anales del Jardín Botánico de Madrid 80, no. 1 (2023): e135. A peer-reviewed comparison of proposed plant identifications and present Mexican ethnobotanical reports, useful for understanding discontinuity and the limits of treating the codex as a current formulary.
The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, series B, part 8. London: Royal Collection with Harvey Miller, 2009. ISBN 978-1-905375-30-1. Catalogue and study of the seventeenth-century Windsor copy, its relation to the original codex and the history of its images.