Book Review Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition By Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano. 308 pp., illustrated. New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 1990. $40 (cloth); $15 (paper).

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Abstract
After an account of Aztec culture in Meso-America at the time of the Spanish Conquest, including a discussion of 16th-century Spanish sources, the author briefly discusses Aztec religion, cosmology, and medicine. He devotes two chapters to the population-carrying capacity of the interior Basin of Mexico before the conquest, given the agricultural methods and food sources available to the Aztecs, and concludes that in 1519 the basin probably supported a population of about 1.2 million people. He demonstrates convincingly that the Aztec diet, based on maize, beans, chia (Salvia hispanica), and amaranth, supplemented by a variable amount of fish, fowl, and insects, contained an ample supply of protein (including the essential amino acids) and vitamins. The Aztecs had no need to practice cannibalism to meet a nutritional need for protein, and their custom of human sacrifice therefore served purely religious purposes.

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