{
  "id": "temazcalli-en-la-medicina-novohispana",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The temazcalli in New Spain's printed medicine: an indigenous sweat bath recorded as therapy in 1615 and proposed for the thermometer in 1772",
  "summary": "The Nahua vapour bath appears in the printed medicine of New Spain as a step in treatment. The Mexican pharmacopoeia of 1615 records it twice as the close of indigenous protocols - after bone-setting with resin, feathers and splints, and a day after purging in the cure of the mal frances - and a Mexico City weekly of 1772 prints a correspondent who rents two of them out, has seen miracles in them, admits patients sometimes come out worse, and wants a thermometer taken inside.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "medicine",
    "americas",
    "new-spain",
    "mexico",
    "indigenous-knowledge",
    "nahuatl",
    "public-health",
    "seventeenth-century",
    "eighteenth-century"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "quatro-libros-de-la-naturaleza-1615"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mercurio-volante-1772"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "carta-de-don-pasqual-al-mercurio-volante-1772"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "maguey-metl-de-nueva-espana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "raiz-de-mechoacan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hospital-real-de-san-jose-de-los-naturales"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cataract-surgery-in-spanish-america"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "marquez-due-antichi-monumenti-1804"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What is a temazcal and how was it used medically?",
    "Did Spanish colonial medicine record or use indigenous sweat baths?",
    "When does the temazcal first appear in a printed medical book of the Americas?",
    "Was the temazcal used after childbirth in colonial Mexico?",
    "Did anyone try to measure the heat of a temazcal?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The earliest of the readings here puts the bath at the end of an orthopaedic protocol. In the chapter \"CAP. XVIII. DE LA LLAMADA NACAZCOL, que dizen otros Tolohuatzin\" of the 1615 Mexican imprint of Ximénez, the seed dried and ground and mixed with an agglutinating resin \"sana admirablemẽte los huessos quebrados, y reduze los descõcertados a su lugar, para lo qual los yndios ponẽ encima vnas plumas, y lo fortificã con sus tablas, y hecho esto metẽ alos enfermos en los baños secos q̃ ellos llaman temazcalli, repitiẽdo tantas vezes este medicamento\" as many times as appears necessary. Feathers, splints, resin plaster and the sweat bath are described as one sequence, and the sequence is attributed to the Indians.",
      "sources": [
        "ximenez-quatro-libros-1615"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The second passage sets it after a purge, in the treatment of the disease the book calls the mal francés. The root of the tlaltzilacayotli taken to the weight of three drams \"quita los dolores nacidos del mal frances, aunq̃ suele causar algunos accidẽtes terribles\", and then: \"tienẽ los yndios, por costumbre vn dia despues de tomada la purga meter los enfermos en el vaño vaporosso, que los llaman temazcalli dẽtro del qual los vañan con agua caliente\". The book distinguishes the two things it saw — a dry bath in one chapter, a vapour bath with hot water washing in another — and gives the Nahuatl name in both places.",
      "sources": [
        "ximenez-quatro-libros-1615"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "A hundred and fifty-seven years later the bath is in a Mexican scientific weekly, in the hands of a reader rather than a physician. The correspondent whose letter the Mercurio volante printed in 1772 tells the editor that he has told his wife and his daughter-in-law not to bathe in the temazcalli \"hasta que yo mire, quando tenga mi Termómetro, quantos grados de calor tiene allá dentro del agua, i se componga para regular bien el temazcalixtli; no sea que se les vaia à calentar mucho la sangre\", and asks the editor to tell the public in a Mercurio what there is in the matter of temazcallis. The instrument is wanted for a domestic decision, and the proposal is to regulate the practice by measurement rather than to abolish it.",
      "sources": [
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The same passage is the best evidence read here for what the baths were used for and by whom, and it is not flattering in only one direction. The correspondent asks the editor not to take their credit away entirely, \"porque yo tengo dos para alquilar à las Parídas del Pueblo, i me va bien\": he owns two temazcales and rents them to the newly delivered women of his town at a profit. He holds it impossible that these baths should not be good, \"siquiera para sudar mucho\", and says he has seen miracles with them — \"aunque otras veces ( valga la verdad ) quedan peores los enfermos\", and the same is said to happen at the Peñol and other places where there are natural temazcallis, \"porque viene la agua caliente, como Dios la crió, por debajo de tierra\". Postpartum use, commercial hire, mixed results and hot springs are all in the same paragraph.",
      "sources": [
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The standing of that 1772 testimony has to be stated with it. The passage comes from a letter signed by a man described as an Indian cacique of a pueblo, introduced by a parish priest who says he emended its phrasing, and the editor printed immediately below the signature that \"à mi se me trasluce algo de supercheria\". Whether the temazcal-keeper existed is therefore undecided by the source; what the source establishes is that this is how the practice could be described in print at Mexico in 1772, by a paper addressed to readers who were expected to recognise it.",
      "sources": [
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The limits of this object are wide and worth naming. Neither source read here is a treatise on the bath: the 1615 entries are incidental to chapters on two plants, and the 1772 passage is a paragraph in a reader's letter. Nothing opened here establishes the construction of a temazcal, its pre-conquest ritual meaning, its regulation by church or magistrate, or any prohibition of it — searches for the word in the printed Mexican provincial councils, in the compilation of Beleña's autos acordados, in Torquemada and in Vetancurt returned nothing in the volumes registered for this corpus, and no claim is made from an absence of hits. What the two printings do show is continuity: the same institution, under the same Nahuatl name, treated as part of ordinary therapeutics in a Mexican medical book of 1615 and in a Mexican medical periodical of 1772.",
      "sources": [
        "ximenez-quatro-libros-1615",
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of the temazcal are written either from archaeology and ritual or from present-day wellness practice, and the colonial medical record between them is usually represented by a paraphrase of Sahagún. This object quotes the two printings it actually opened: the 1615 Mexican pharmacopoeia placing the \"baños secos q̃ ellos llaman temazcalli\" at the end of a bone-setting protocol with feathers and splints, and again a day after the purge in the cure of the mal francés, \"el vaño vaporosso … dẽtro del qual los vañan con agua caliente\"; and the 1772 Mexico City weekly in which a correspondent who rents two of them to the women of his town wants a thermometer taken inside, has seen miracles and admits that patients sometimes come out worse. It also states, rather than hides, that the 1772 witness is a letter the editor himself suspected of being a contrivance.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-16",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/temazcalli-en-la-medicina-novohispana",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/temazcalli-en-la-medicina-novohispana.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "The temazcalli in New Spain's printed medicine: an indigenous sweat bath recorded as therapy in 1615 and proposed for the thermometer in 1772",
    "description": "The Nahua vapour bath appears in the printed medicine of New Spain as a step in treatment. The Mexican pharmacopoeia of 1615 records it twice as the close of indigenous protocols - after bone-setting with resin, feathers and splints, and a day after purging in the cure of the mal frances - and a Mexico City weekly of 1772 prints a correspondent who rents two of them out, has seen miracles in them, admits patients sometimes come out worse, and wants a thermometer taken inside.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/temazcalli-en-la-medicina-novohispana",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-16",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Quatro libros de la naturaleza, y virtudes de las plantas, y animales que estan receuidos en el vso de medicina en la Nueua España",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=qQpFp_bImPMC&pg=PP1"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Mercurio volante, con noticias importantes i curiosas sobre varios asuntos de fisica i medicina, por D. Josef Ignacio Bartolache, doctor medico del claustro de esta Real Universidad de Mexico",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=_q1jAP-UEgQC&pg=PA1"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "The temazcalli in New Spain's printed medicine: an indigenous sweat bath recorded as therapy in 1615 and proposed for the thermometer in 1772"
  }
}