North American Tree Rings, Climatic Extremes, and Social Disasters - Dendroclimatology - page 315

Fig. 10.13 The demographic
collapse in Mexico following
conquest in the sixteenth
century is illustrated with
population estimates from
Cook and Simpson ( 1948 )
and Gerhard ( 1993 ) . The
heavy mortality in the 1540s
and 1570s has been linked to
indigenous hemorrhagic
fevers (i.e., 'cocoliztli') and
climate extremes by
Acuna-Soto et al. ( 2002 ) . The
population of Mexico did not
return to pre-conquest levels
until the twentieth century
'maximalists' such as Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah estimating 15-20 mil-
lion (Cook and Simpson 1948 ) . The weight of opinion seems to favor the high count,
and the population estimates for Mexico shown in Fig. 10.13 are based on the work
of Cook and Borah (Gerhard 1993 ) .
The epidemic of 1519-1520 was certainly caused by smallpox and killed an
estimated 8 million native Mexicans during the war of conquest with Cortez
(Acuna-Soto et al. 2002 ; Fig. 10.13 ) . The conventional wisdom has been that
the catastrophic epidemics of 1545-1548 and 1576-1580, which killed an esti-
mated 12-15 million and 2-2.5 million people, respectively, were also the result
of introduced European or African diseases such as measles, smallpox, and typhus
(Acuna-Soto et al. 2000 ; Marr and Kiracofe 2000 ) . The epidemic of 1545-1548
killed an estimated 80% of the native population of Mexico, which in absolute and
percentage terms approaches the severity of the Black Death of bubonic plague from
1347 to 1351, when, conservatively, 25 million people perished in western Europe,
or about 50% of the population. But the devastating Mexican epidemics of 1545
and 1576 are now believed by some epidemiologists to have been indigenous hem-
orrhagic fevers called 'cocoliztli' and later 'matlazahuatl' (Nahuatl terms for 'pest').
These epidemics may have been misdiagnosed as smallpox and typhus due in part to
mistranslations of contemporary descriptions and the repetition of historical error.
Two recent articles in the epidemiological literature cite new translations from the
original Latin texts to make the convincing argument that the catastrophes of 1545
and 1576 were hemorrhagic fevers—probably caused by an indigenous agent, pos-
sibly with a rodent vector—that was leveraged by a sequence of climatic extremes
and aggravated by the appalling living conditions of the native people under the
encomienda system of New Spain.
Acuna-Soto et al. ( 2000 ) and Marr and Kiracofe ( 2000 ) cite descriptions of
cocoliztli by Dr. Francisco Hernandez, the proto-medico of New Spain and former