RT Journal
T1 OLd mexican medicine
JF Journal of the American Medical Association
JO Journal of the American Medical Association
YR 1909
FD December 18
VO LIII
IS 25
SP 2104
OP 2105
DO 10.1001/jama.1909.02550250058006
UL http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.1909.02550250058006
AB American historians, especially W. H. Prescott and H. H. Bancroft, have called attention to the fact that medicine reached a very high development among the Mexicans before the coming of Cortés. Their hospitals were well arranged, numerous, and existed in nearly every part of the country; and the traditions of treatment and the observations made on patients raised the art of healing to a high plane. The knowledge of plants was extensive, and even the science of diagnosis was notably developed. Women as well as men practiced medicine, and the department of women's diseases was exclusively in their hands. Indeed, medical traditions were so advanced as to make students of the history of medicine doubt whether such a high development of medical art and science could have been attained among a people apart from the great stream of medical tradition in Europe. There are records of cases in which European