Explained: Merit Ptah — said to be the first woman physician. Was she?

For decades, an ancient Egyptian has been celebrated as the first woman physician.

For decades, an ancient Egyptian has been celebrated as the first woman physician. Known by the name Merit Ptah, she appears in online posts about women in STEM, in computer games, and in popular history books; even a crater on Venus is named after her. Now, a researcher from the University of Colorado has suggested that no physician by that name ever existed. Dr Jakub Kwiecinski of the Department of Immunology and Microbiology believes that the attribution might be the result of mistaken identity.

Kwiecinski found that Ptah was first mentioned in the 1930s, when Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, a medical historian, wrote a history of women in medicine. Her book mentioned a picture of a woman named Merit Ptah on the site where a tomb in the Valley of Kings was excavated.

In 1929-30, an excavation in Giza uncovered a tomb of Akhethetep, an Old Kingdom courtier, which mentioned a woman called Peseshet as “Overseer of Healer Women”. Both Peseshet and Ptah came from the same period, and mentions to both were made in the tombs of their sons.

According to Kwiecinski, Hurd-Mead confused Ptah with Peseshet, “and from a misunderstood case of an authentic Egyptian woman healer, Peseshet, a seemingly earlier Merit Ptah, ‘the first woman physician’ was born”.