Images of Death: Disease Representations in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

Contact between Iberian conquistadors and Indigenous populations some five hundred years ago in continental America—and subsequent interaction between their distinct pathogenic microorganisms—sparked a rich epidemio logical situation in which members of New Spain’s newly established fractal society¹ faced a combination of familiar and previously unknown epidemic diseases between 1520 and 1560.² Some of these diseases, notably smallpox, measles, typhus, and syphilis, have been studied systematically.³ However, previous studies have limited themselves to reproducing the prevailing traditional (European) narrative for each epidemic, without either offering new visions based on a reconsideration of the historical sources or proposing and testing.