My source for our video project (The Meeting of Two Worlds) is a journal article called Public Health in Aztec Society written by Herbert R. Harvey, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  The source focuses on Aztec society prior to colonization, particularly in the sector of public healthcare and sanitation.  Opening with statistics on the population of Aztec society during the early 1500s, it acknowledges that the high population density in itself poses potential negative implications to the general health of the people, and thus goes on to examine why there are no known cases of epidemics or generalized chronic endemic ailments throughout archaeological and historical records pertaining to Aztec society.

The source uses information from historical documents regarding the first impressions that colonizers had of Aztec society in order to make inferences about management of urban areas and their subsequent correlations to public health.  Describing the extreme cleanliness of the streets and public areas and the widespread practice of planting aromatic trees along the paths, Harvey notes that the Aztecs placed a high value on having a pristine environment.  This implementation of regular maintenance and cleaning of public spaces would have contributed to the general health and well being of the population along with acting as a preventative measure against disease.  The source also gives insight into the Aztecs’ advanced water system, the use of the aquaduct as well as the process of storing and transporting clean water in canoes to area where the aquaduct was absent.  Furthermore, Aztec communities strategically placed a significant number of public outhouses which prevented excrement from getting lost or contaminating other areas.  Disposal of the dead was generally through the process of cremation (with the exception of certain cases which were given burials instead), which proved to be valuable to public health.  In terms of medicine, the Aztec did a lot of experimentation with different herbs and plants that were thought to contain healing properties; though they mostly believed the causes of ailments to be supernatural, their administered treatments were often empirical.  The intersections between religion and science within Aztec society showed that Aztecs did not see these two notions in opposition to one another, but rather complementing the other.  Last but not least, although good hygiene was a characteristic prevalent in most Aztec communities, the strict moral code in which Aztecs held also surprisingly contributed to the overall good health of the population.  The harsh punishments for adultery had an unintentionally positive effect on public health as it significantly reduced the spread of sexually transmitted infections to a minimum.  Overall, the sanitation measures taken by the Aztec society prior to colonization as described by the source are evidentially effective (though some of them were unintentional) as the Aztec people lived in generally good health.