totomoniliztli (FCbk12f53v)
This iconographic example, featuring a black and white sketch of people with pustules all over their bodies (totomoniliztli), is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the text near the image in the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. This example shows five men and women (four lying down and one sitting up somewhat) covered with pustules on their bodies. One woman (a healer), who does not appear to be sick, attends to one of the afflicted. She speaks to that person, which is marked by a speech scroll emerging from her mouth. One of the people who are ill also emits a speech scroll, perhaps moaning. The afflicted are wrapped in blankets and they lie on woven mats (petlatl). Rolled pillows appear at their heads. The keywording team of the Florentine Codex note that this is a smallpox epidemic of 1520, in the midst of the battles for power over Tenochtitlan.
Stephanie Wood
Supportive of the images here, the Codex Osuna shows a person wrapped in a blanket lying on a woven mat and emitting speech scrolls, too. Wool blankets were needed for a hospital that is mentioned in the Codice Sierra-Texupan (below). The same codex refers to the care givers (e.g., ticitl) who were active at the time when epidemic disease was raging, and images of people who were ill also appear.
Stephanie Wood
tutomoniliztli
totomoniliztli
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
pestilencia, enfermedad, enfermedades, epidemia, epidemias
totomoniliz(tli), an illness of pustules, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/totomoniliztli
una enfermedad de pústulas
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 12: Conquest of Mexico", fol. 53v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/12/folio/53v/images/0 Accessed 7 February 2026.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
