Quotes by James Henry Breasted

About James Henry Breasted:

James Henry Breasted was an American archaeologist, Egyptologist, and historian. After completing his PhD at the University of Berlin in 1894, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. In 1901 he became director of the Haskell Oriental Museum at the University of Chicago, where he continued to concentrate on Egypt. In 1905 Breasted was promoted to professor, and was the first chair in Egyptology and Oriental History in the United States. In 1919 he became the founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Very often conditions are recorded as observable "under thy fingers" [...] Among such observations it is important to notice that the pulsations of the human heart are observed.

James Henry Breasted

[...] we have in our treatise a series of fifty-seven examinations, almost exclusively of injuries of the human body forming a group of observations furnishing us with the earliest known nucleus of fact regarding the anatomy, physiology and pathology...

James Henry Breasted

The attention given to the side of the head which has received the injury, in connection with a specific reference to the side of the body nervously affected, is in itself evidence that in this case the ancient surgeon was already beginning observati...

James Henry Breasted

The seat of consciousness and intelligence was from the earliest times regarded by the Egyptians as both the heart and the bowels or abdomen. Our surgeon, however, has observed the fact that injuries to the brain affect other parts of the body, espec...

James Henry Breasted

Here we see the word "brain" occurring for the first time in human speech, as far as it is known to us; and in discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon's effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of com...

James Henry Breasted

Speechlessness, however, affirmed in the diagnosis, is carefully based on the facts of the examination, as we see by rendering the statements concerned, just as they stand in examination and diagnosis: "If thou examinest a man having a wound in the t...

James Henry Breasted

Increase Mather, President of Harvard University, in his treatise on Remarkable Providences, insists that the smell of herbs alarms the Devil and that medicine expels him. Such beliefs have probably even now not wholly disappeared from among us.

James Henry Breasted

In the field of Egyptian mathematics Professor Karpinski of the University of Michigan has long insisted that surviving mathematical papyri clearly demonstrate the Egyptians' scientific interest in pure mathematics for its own sake. I have now no dou...

James Henry Breasted

[...] the success of Egyptian surgery in setting broken bones is very fully demonstrated in the large number of well-joined fractures found in the ancient skeletons.

James Henry Breasted

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

James Henry Breasted

By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile...

James Henry Breasted

It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history.

James Henry Breasted

This recognition of the earlier human background, now so obvious to us, did not come all at once, for the inclusion of history itself in university instruction is an event less than two centuries old.

James Henry Breasted

The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.

James Henry Breasted

In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.

James Henry Breasted

But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.

James Henry Breasted

In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

James Henry Breasted

Disapproval is a very important factor in all progress. There has really never been any progress without it.

James Henry Breasted

We of America are especially fitted to visualize and to understand the marvellous transformation of a wilderness into a land of splendid cities.

James Henry Breasted

Today the traveller on the Nile enters a wonderland at whose gates rise the colossal pyramids of which he has had visions perhaps from earliest childhood.

James Henry Breasted

Author Bio

  • NameJames Henry Breasted
  • DescriptionAmerican historian and archaeologist
  • BornAugust 27, 1865
  • DiedDecember 2, 1935
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAnthropologist; Archaeologist; Historian; Egyptologist