Source / Illustrated medical manuscript
Created in 1552 at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, the manuscript commonly called the Badianus Manuscript records medicinal plants and treatments attributed to the Nahua physician Martín de la Cruz, translated into Latin by the Nahua scholar Juan Badiano.
The codex is neither an untouched survival of pre-conquest medicine nor simply a European herbal made in Mexico. Its text, images, language, patronage, and journey to Spain preserve Indigenous knowledge through the unequal conditions of early colonial translation.
Reading the source
The manuscript arranges treatments by bodily problem and presents richly coloured plants alongside Latin descriptions. Reading it requires attention to what each medium communicates—and to what translation may have displaced.
De la Cruz is identified as an Indigenous physician associated with the college. The remedies attributed to him make local expertise visible, although the surviving manuscript does not preserve an unmediated transcript of everything he knew or practised.
Latin made the work legible to European patrons and learned readers. Translation involved choices about plant names, bodily concepts, genres, and credibility, creating a new text rather than a neutral duplicate of a lost Nahuatl original.
The manuscript includes 185 colour illustrations according to Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. Their forms, roots, flowers, glyphic elements, and page placement connect botanical recognition to Indigenous visual practice and European book conventions.
Ingredients and treatments belonged to a world already transformed by epidemic disease, Christian institutions, tribute, gardens, markets, and transatlantic exchange. The codex records adaptation and survival as well as loss.
Patronage, collecting, return
The work was prepared at the request of Francisco de Mendoza, son of the first viceroy of New Spain, and sent to Europe as a gift intended for the Spanish crown. Its portable luxury and medicinal content made Indigenous knowledge part of a project of patronage and imperial value.
It passed through the Escorial, a royal pharmacist's collection, the Barberini library, and eventually the Vatican Library. These transfers preserved the volume while separating it from the community and landscape in which it had been produced.
The Vatican returned the manuscript to Mexico in 1991, and it is now held by the National Library of Anthropology and History. Return changes custody, but it cannot restore the lost Nahuatl wording or recover every contributor whose name was omitted.
Modern plant identification presents another difficulty. Matching an image or colonial name to a present taxonomic species can be valuable, yet overconfidence may erase historical naming systems and the cultural relationships through which a substance became medicinal.
Across the collection
Connect Indigenous knowledge to colonial exchange, extraction, migration, epidemics, and public health.
Follow plants through naming, illustration, collecting, trade, experiment, and pharmaceutical development.
Compare how images made bodies, plants, instruments, and observations persuasive.