Egypt’s first woman doctor a myth, research suggests

EDMONTON • A historical feminist icon, one of the first women of science, a famed physician from ancient Egypt, didn’t actually exist, says new research, and the belief that she did can be traced back to a 1938 account from a Canadian feminist.

It’s a story that illustrates the conflict between popular history and academic history and, indeed, shows how difficult it is to trace historical knowledge back thousands upon thousands of years.

In her book A History of Women in Medicine: From the Earliest of Times to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century, Kate Campbell Hurd-mead set out to write the definitive history of women in medicine. She mentions a tomb, found in the Valley of the Kings, where there was supposedly a “picture of a woman named Merit Ptah, the mother of a high priest, who is calling her ‘the Chief Physician,’ ” wrote Hurd-mead.

She says “the first woman doctor of ‘the old kingdom’ in the fifth dynasty, or about 2730 BC, practised during the reign of a queen Neferirika-ra.”

Hurd-mead was born in Quebec, but moved to the United States early in her life, and was responsible for the propagation of a couple other medical myths, including arguing that Trotula was a Sicilian female physician, whereas later scholars argued the Trotula was actually a collection of three different texts.

But, argues Jakub Kwiecinski, a medical historian at the University of Colorado Anschutz, Merit Ptah simply didn’t exist. For starters, notes Science Alert, the Valley of Kings — a collection of tombs dating from ancient Egypt — wasn’t even used until a millennium later.

But what his research showed wasn’t just that Merit Ptah probably didn’t exist, it could have been, rather, a case of mistaken identity. In 1929-30, a tomb was excavated in Giza, which contained the remains of Akhethetep, a courtier and official to the pharaoh Djedkare Isesi.

Behind a false door in that tomb was mention of Peseshet, described as “overseer of the healer women,” and probably Akhethetep’s mother; she’s attested to in some historical works — one of which Hurd-mead owned. And so, Kwiecinski argues, Hurd-mead confused the two women.