Story: Te hauora Māori i mua – history of Māori health

This image of a tohunga painted by Gottfried Lindauer was a reworking of an earlier work by Horatio Robley, painted around 1863. The tohunga is being fed because he is so tapu that he is unable to touch the food himself. One role of tohunga was to heal people if they got sick. Often sickness was believed to have been brought about as a result of breaches of tapu.