by AMNH on Don’t miss this rare view of aspects of traditional
Tibetan medicine in exquisite paintings from a set in the
Museum’s collections, based on illustrations from the late 17th
century. On view in the Audubon Gallery on the fourth floor,
these hand-painted reproductions provide a unique and rich
illustrated history of early medical knowledge and procedures in
Tibet, as Laila Williamson, curator of Body and Spirit, explains
in this video: The 64 paintings on display are believed to be
among only a handful of such sets in existence. Each of them was
painstakingly reproduced by hand in the late 1990s by Romio
Shrestha, a Nepalese artist, 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 Blu