Tibetans believe the body and spirit are one.

• Position: Medical History

"Body and Spirit: Tibetan Medical Paintings" is on view for the first time in a museum exhibition. These hand-painted reproductions of traditional scroll paintings provide a unique and richly illustrated history of early medical knowledge and procedures in Tibet, and are believed to be among only a handful of such sets in existence.

"[Our] Tibetan collection, from which these paintings are taken, comprises nearly 2,800 objects, and is among the finest in the U.S.," says Ellen V. Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History. "This exhibition represents the continuation of a great artistic tradition and offers visitors a unique and fascinating perspective on early Tibetan culture."

Each of the 64 paintings on display was reproduced by hand in the late 1990s by Nepalese artist Romio Shrestha and his students, who followed the Tibetan tradition of copying older paintings, basing their work on two published sets of medical tangkas likely painted in the early 1900s that were copies of the original set. The originals were created in the late 1600s to illustrate the Blue Beryl, an important commentary on the classic Tibetan medical text, The Four Tantras.

The Blue Beryl was written by Sangye Gyatso, regent to the Fifth Dalai Lama, who commissioned the original paintings for use as teaching aids in the medical school he founded in Lhasa, Tibet. The causes, diagnostic techniques, and treatments of illness, as well as human anatomy, are represented in nearly 8,000 extraordinarily detailed images painted on canvas using vegetable and mineral dyes. The ! fate of the original paintings is unknown; Shrestha based his work on published sources.

Shrestha was born in Kathmandu, Nepal. When he was six years old, two Tibetan Buddhist monks arrived at his home to announce that he was the 17th reincarnation of the master Tibetan medical painter Arniko. The monks gave Shrestha a stock of valuable art materials, explaining that he would one day form his own school of painting.

Shrestha's father, who did not want his son to become a monk, sent him to Roman Catholic school. Shrestha has said that this background of mixed religious influences endowed him with a spirituality that he wants to express in visual form. Inspired by images he saw in books and in monasteries around Kathmandu, Shrestha taught himself to paint and went on to establish a school in Nepal in 1968. His paintings can be found in many of the great collections of the world.

"Although...