No Longer Home: The Smellscape of Mexico City, 1500–1600

Abstract

During the course of the sixteenth century, the Aztec (or Mexica) city of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco (present-day Mexico City) was transformed from a sweet-smelling lacustrine city into a foul one, the direct result of the Spanish invasion (1519–21). This article reconstructs both the sources of odors and culturally situated ideas about smell among the city’s Nahuatl-speaking residents. They are opposed to the ideas about smell held by settler colonists, derived from the framework of Hippocratic medicine. These imported ideas about acceptable smells (like those of urban slaughterhouses) and dangerous smells (swamps) came to have disastrous consequences as they played out in the unique environment of the Basin of Mexico.

The Healthscaping Approach: Towards a Global History of Early Public Health

“…For, how do we "provincialize Europe," to follow Dipesh Chakrabarty's call, when it comes to public health in earlier eras? How do we hone emic or authentic local perspectives across the globe, not only for its own sake, but also in order to illuminate transregional and cross-cultural exchanges, in this case of prophylactic knowledge and practice, without imposing a Eurocentric perspective and flattening the landscape unduly (Polanco 2019;Mundy 2021)?…”

“…This may include, especially in ancient and non-literate societies, acts of prevention or communal healing, either physical or spiritual, done in a public setting and carried out by individuals, health specialists, administrators or political or religious leaders. In this way, for nearly a century, scholars have steadily dismantled the edifice of earlier societies' hygienic apathy by providing evidence for public health theory, policy and practice (Rosen 1958;Guerra 1964Guerra , 1966Harvey 1981;Waite 1987; Ortiz de Montellano 1990;Porter 1999;Kinzelbach 2006;Jørgensen 2008;Wilson Bower 2013;Fay 2015;Skelton 2015;Agresta 2020;Gómez-Dantés and Frank 2020;Mundy 2021). Yet despite these works' quality and broad geographical and chronological span, the field's focal point has remained western European cities between the thirteenth and eighteenth century, that is the area and era immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution.…”