The Herbolaria room at the Museum of Mexican Medicine is like entering a pre-Hispanic codex in the flesh and seeing all the species mentioned alive, floating around in formaldehyde. It is a hallucinating place where even the corn that we see every day seems extraterrestrial again. In other words, this room honors a country brimming with diversity and medicinal tradition.
The room is dimly lit so that the glass tubes in which the plants float function as lamps. These jars are arranged side by side on three of the walls of the room, and on another wall there are pre-Hispanic tools for preparing medicinal potions with plants. There are also, in one corner of the room, some pages from the wonderful Codex Badiano (1552), a treatise written by the indigenous physician Martín de la Cruz describing the healing properties of the American plants used by the Mexica.
Almost all plants are recognizable and can be found in a market, such as corn, of course, or toloache, pericon flower, orozus, mushrooms. And there they explain the use that pre-Hispanic cultures gave them compared to the use we give them today.
The Museum of Medicine as a whole is an imposing, chilling place. We are not used to seeing the medical instruments (so cruel) that have existed throughout time, nor sick, decomposed bodies, nor our own anatomy in such a crude way. That is why the Herbolaria room is an oasis within the museum, it is pure balm, pure healing magic floating beautifully in glass tubes.
The ochre colors, which time and liquid have given to the plants, in contrast to the navy blue of the walls, leave you with a soothing dreamy feeling.
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The amazing Museum of Medicine in the Old Palace of the Inquisition
A journey into the bowels of one's own body: the Anatomy Room at the Museum of Medicine
When El Chopo was a curious Natural History Museum