OIP 4. The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Volume 2: Facsimile Plates and Line for Line Hieroglyphic Transliteration

OIP 4. The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Volume 2: Facsimile Plates and Line for Line Hieroglyphic Transliteration

Author: J. H. Breasted

Year: 1930

Behind the scientifically accurate study and publication of The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, the most important document in the history of science surviving from the pre-Greek age of mankind (seventeenth century b.c.), lies a story as remarkable as the papyrus itself. Early in 1862, during his residence in Thebes, Mr. Edwin Smith, a man of great intellectual gifts, purchased what is now known as the Edwin Smith Surgical papyrus. How it came into the possession of the New York Historical Society, lay many years virtually unnoticed, was at length "rediscovered" and brought to Dr. Breasted's attention, and finally under his close scrutiny has revealed itself as the oldest known scientific treatise surviving from the ancient world, is described in the Introduction to one of the most illuminating glimpses we have ever had into the astonishingly developed medical knowledge of ancient Egypt. Both to the medical profession and to the lay reader the Surgical Papyrus will be of intense interest. It contains, for example, for the first time in human speech a word for "brain." Disclosing an inductive method and an attitude surprisingly scientific in an age so remote from modern times, it form