30 May 2025 / 10 House
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Find out moreWhat’s going on in this image from the Florentine Codex?
ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Tecpaocelotl: I’ve seen this image in the Florentine Codex Book 10 and I have no idea what is going on...? (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
This image comes from Chapter 28 of Book 10, ‘which telleth of the ailments of the body and of medicines suitable to use for their cure.’ Paragraph six, ‘which telleth of the medicines to cure one when wounded, or to set broken bones’, contains the following advice (relating to the image, left):-
’If one has wrenched his neck, first his neck is massaged, relaxed, straightened there where it is wrenched. When it has been stretched, then one quickly drinks [an infusion of] the cooling coaxiuitl [herb]. Twice or three times one drinks it. It distributes, circulates, the blood in order not to damage his heart. And later one is to be bled with an obsidian blade there where it is wrenched, perhaps on the left side, so that it will not swell. And one is bled on a vessel of the head.’
Image scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition of the Florentine Codex, Madrid, 1994.
Info from Florentine Codex: Book 10 - The People, translated from the Aztec into English, with notes and illustrations by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J.O. Anderson, School of American Research and University of Utah, Santa Fe, 1961, p. 139 and p.161.
Comments (1)
t
tecpaocelotl
6th Apr 2014
Thanks for the response.
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