hospital (Osu6v)
This painted iconographic example features a hospital (a loanword taken into Nahuatl from Spanish). It is a glyph-like image, showing a small building where the one patient fills the entryway, lying on a woven mat (probably a petlatl), and emitting speech scrolls (probably groans from the discomfort of illness). The gloss for the term was written by the same Nahua tlacuilo who wrote “cocoxqui” (a person who is ill). A Spanish notary added that this was a hospital for “los indios” (Indigenous people). The fuller manuscript page shows the tribute that was demanded by the Spanish overlord from the Nahuas for construction of the hospital. The Nahuas complain here that they were not getting paid for these large quantities of lime (tenextli) bundles.
Stephanie Wood
This visual of a hospital and a sick person is a reflection on the period when epidemics were taking the lives of lots of Indigenous people. They did not have the necessary immunities to germs introduced inadvertently by the colonizers that they would have had if they had been exposed to such germs for millenia or at least centuries. Discussions about the hospitals that were being built to cure the local people are found under this term in the Online Nahuatl Dictionary. Contrary to some other places, the colonizers of New Spain did not purposely introduce diseases in order to clear and seize the land; they wanted the tribute and labor that the Nahuas were providing them. Spaniards were tapping into pre-contact tribute and labor systems, and they were horrified by the rapid loss of workers. Eventually, they would begin accumulating land and building large estates on a much larger scale when the Native population reached its nadir here in the seventeenth century.
Stephanie Wood
ospital
hospital
Stephanie Wood
1551–1565
Jeff Haskett-Wood
hospitales, epidemia, epidemias, enfermo, enfermos, colonialismo, protesta, protestas, resistencia
hospital, a hospital, a word loaned from Spanish, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/hospital
cocoxqui, a person who is ill, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cocoxqui
tenex(tli), lime (burnt or slaked limestone), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tenextli
el hospital
Stephanie Wood
Library of Congress Online Catalog and the World Digital Library, Osuna Codex, or Painting of the Governor, Mayors, and Rulers of Mexico, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_07324/. The original is located in the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
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