Article suitable for Top Juniors and above

Aztec pregnancy: Dos and Don’ts

18th May 2020

Aztec midwife attending a pregnant woman, Florentine Codex

At least half a dozen chapters in Book 6 of the Florentine Codex focus on the role of the all-important midwife caring for a pregnant woman. Our researcher Julia Flood, prepared some time ago a downloadable 4-page resource, which shows you just how seriously the Aztecs took the whole subject of preparing for birth (click on the PDF icon). First, though, do watch this great new little (4-min) video, written by Professor Kay Read (a member of our Panel of Experts), for the TED-Ed platform.

Special thanks to Professor Kay Read for this resource.

Main picture: Florentine Codex, Book VI Chapter 27, scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994.

‘Call the Aztec Midwife’ - National Geographic feature Visit the TED-Ed page for extra teaching resource material based on the video

Comments (1)

Amanda

14th Mar 2008

I love this site! I wanted to point out that the pregnancy page was difficult to read. For some reason, enlarging the pictures actually made the text less legible. I was sort of able to read the pages, but not the captions. I hope you will be able to type this page into a more web-friendly format. It is so interesting! Thank you for all the info!

Mexicolore

Thanks for your kind comments, Amanda. We’re aware of some of the technical hitches with viewing our website in certain browsers etc., and we’re working with our webmaster on it to try and improve things. Possibly we will have to adapt fixed-width pages in the future. Please bear with us...
(2011): we’ve also had feedback to suggest some of the downloadable PDF files aren’t ‘there’. We’ve corrected this at least and they all seem to be in place at the moment. Sorry!
2020 Problems solved! The whole format of the page is now different, and improved...!

Aztec midwife attending a pregnant woman, Florentine Codex