Historical Tradition and Oriental Research

Abstract

IT has often been remarked that the outstanding trait of the untrained mind is credulity. The rationalisa-tion of man's views of the world has been a very slow process and it is still very far from a completed process. It has commonly been thought to have begun with the Greeks, but its origin must be sought in the Orient in a period long before Greek civilisation had arisen. The Edwin Smith Medical Papyrus, acquired in 1906 by the New York Historical Society, discloses the inductive process of scientific investigation already in operation in the seventeenth century before Christ. For example, this document contains the earliest occurrence of the word “brain “anywhere appearing in surviving records of the past. The word is unknown in Old Testament Hebrew, in Babylonian, Assyrian, or any of the ancient languages of Western Asia. The organ itself therefore was evidently discovered, and the recognition of its various functions was begun, for the first time by these physicians of early Egypt in the thousand years preceding the seventeenth century B.C. The observations recorded in the Edwin Smith Medical Papyrus show that its author had already observed that control of the members and limbs of the body was localised in different sides of the brain; and the recognition of localisation of functions in the brain, mostly the work of modern surgeons and others within the past generation or two, had already begun in the seventeenth century B.C., at a time when all Europe still lay in savagery or barbarism.