Body and Spirit: Tibetan Medical Paintings, a catalogue for an art exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, is the latest in a series of publications showcasing a magnificent set of paintings about Tibetan medicine. Other publications reproducing the Tibetan medical paintings collection include John F. Avedon et al., The Buddha's Art of Healing: Tibetan Paintings Rediscovered (New York: Rizzoli International, 1998); Byams pa ‘phrin las and Wang Lei, Tibetan Medical Thangka of the Four Medical Tantras (People's Publishing House of Tibet, 1994); and Yuri Parfinovitch et al., Tibetan Medical Paintings: Illustrations to the “Blue Beryl” Treatise of Sangye Gyamtso (1653–1705) (2 vols., New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992). The paintings here were created by Romio Shrestha, a contemporary artist who directs a studio in Kathmandu, using traditional techniques and paints made from natural materials. The catalogue includes a total of seventy-nine paintings (thang ka), with a short preface by Laila Williamson (senior scientific assistant at the American Museum of Natural History) and a more substantial introduction by Janet Gyatso (professor of Buddhist studies at Harvard). Each painting's multiple captions have been translated into English by Lozang Jamspal (Columbia University) and Serenity Young (research associate at the American Museum of Natural History).

Shrestha's reproduction is now one of several extant sets of medical paintings that were originally commissioned by Sangye Gyatso (1653–1705), the Fifth Dalai Lama's regent. The paintings illustrate Sangye Gyatso's own work, the Blue Beryl (Baidurya sngon po), a detailed commentary to the Four Medical Tantras (Rgyud bzhi), the text that forms the backbone of much of Tibet's medical scholarship and practice. The paintings depict particular issues from each chapter, and include thousands of tiny details of medical, religious, botanical, zoological, and cultural interest. Close scrutiny reveals images both delightful and disturbing: We see human figures experiencing various forms of illness and doctors performing treatment; humans, animals, and spirits interacting with each other; and depictions of individual medicinal substances, anatomical and physiological diagrams, landscapes, costumes, hairstyles, and more.

Janet Gyatso's history of the collection's origins points out that such paintings were produced at a time when Central Tibet was newly unified and Lhasa was becoming a force of cosmopolitan culture across Asia. During this period, many foreign doctors were involved with the Fifth Dalai Lama's court, medical texts were being revised and republished, and new medical institutions were springing up around the region. Gyatso proposes that medicine was forging for itself an authority based on empiricism that was markedly distinct from that of Buddhism. She sees this attitude expressed in the medical paintings themselves: While a strong Buddhist element can be identified, “religion is not the central concern” (p. 6) for the bulk of tiny images in the collection.

Gyatso provides historical detail on the careful development of these paintings, emphasizing a concern for truthful representation. While the accuracy and detail of some paintings may have served pedagogical purposes well, Gyatso observes that in others, they add little information beyond the text that is their referent. She proposes that the collection may have been upheld as a celebration of Tibetan medicine's scope and virtuosity. She also considers how the images in their everydayness give us a glimpse of common cultural practices and assumptions, a fascinating portrayal of ordinary life that is rare in the world of Tibetan painting.

While Gyatso's introduction is a contribution to scholarship on Tibetan medical imagery, and Shrestha's artistry is exceptional, Body and Spirit lacks general explanations for the layperson to learn from the individual paintings. The seventy-nine paintings are displayed on the left-side pages of the book, with English translations of their many small captions on the right. However, no additional commentary has been provided; a newcomer to Tibetan medicine would not learn much from the often cryptic captions. An essay on Tibetan medicine, such as that provided in Parfinovitch et al., would be helpful. The presentation of the translations, moreover, could have been better organized. While many of the paintings have small images and captions arranged neatly in rows, to be read from left to right, for others, it is difficult to decipher which translation corresponds to which Tibetan image.

Body and Spirit also lacks a scholarly apparatus that could allow the expert to utilize these paintings in any significant way. It is a disappointment that this publication of medical paintings does not include a comparative study of the several available sets. Cai Jingfeng's set of eighty paintings comes from Lhasa; the forty paintings in Avedon et al. come from Ulan-Ude (in Buryatia); the seventy-seven paintings in Parfinovitch et al. also reproduce the Ulan-Ude collection (with the exception of Plate 62, which was based on a Lhasa painting). Although the preface states that Shrestha's paintings are based “faithfully” on already published sets, in fact, the Body and Spirit set is not identical to any available collection. The seventy-eighth and seventy-ninth paintings in Body and Spirit, for example, are found only in Cai Jingfeng's edition, where they are numbered six and seven. The absence of analysis of the collection leaves us wondering about the reorganization and suggests that the book does not aim to document a historically Tibetan presentation of medical painting. In short, aside from the artistic and historical contributions by Shrestha and Gyatso, respectively, the book adds little to existing scholarship on Tibetan medical painting. The publication by Parfinovitch et al. remains the best work on the subject, but given its high cost, Body and Spirit may be an affordable, if not academically satisfying, alternative.