World's first female doctor Merit Ptah a case of mistaken identity

US researcher has claimed that the worlds first female physician, Merit Ptah and a role model for women entering medicine wasn't the first in her field. Jakub Kwiecinski, a researcher from the University of Colorado's Anschutz Medical Campus, claimed that she is a case of mistaken identity. 

Case of mistaken identity

In a statement, he said, that almost like a detective, he had to trace back her story following every lead to discover how it all began and who discovered Merit Ptah. According to Kwiecinski, Merit Ptah the physician had her origins in the 1930s when Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, a medical historian, set out to write a complete history of medical women around the world in a book which was published in 1938.

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Talking about the excavation of a tomb in the Valley of Kings, Hurd-Mead had said that there was a picture of a woman doctor named Merit Ptah, the mother of a high priest, who called her the Chief Physician. Kwiecinski claimed that there was no record of such a person being a physician. He elaborated that Merit Ptah as a name existed in the Old Kingdom, but it does not appear in any of the collated lists of ancient Egyptian healers - not even as one of the `legendary', or 'controversial cases'. She was even absent from the list of Old Kingdom women administrators. And that No Old Kingdom tombs are present in the Valley of the Kings, where the story places Merit Ptah's son. Only a handful of such tombs exist in the larger area, the Theban Necropolis, he added. 

He said that there was another woman who bore a striking resemblance to Merit Ptah. In 1929-30, an excavation in Giza uncovered a tomb of Akhethetep. Inside, a false door depicted a woman called Peseshet, described as the 'Overseer of Healer Women.' Peseshet and Merit Ptah came from the same time periods and were both mentioned in the tombs of their sons who were high priestly officials. Kwiecinski believes that the discovery of Akhethetep found its way into Hurd-Mead's private library creating the confusion.  He further said that unfortunately, Hurd-Mead in her own book accidentally mixed up the name of the ancient healer and so, from a misunderstood case of an authentic Egyptian woman healer, Peseshet, a seemingly earlier Merit Ptah, 'the first woman physician' was born. 

He also said that his interest in Merit Ptah was sparked after seeing her name almost everywhere. He explained that Merit Ptah was everywhere, in online posts about women, in computer games and in popular history books. He added that there was even a crater on Venus named after her. He also added that even with all the mentions, there wasn’t any proof that she really existed, the medical historian said in a paper published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.

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