Merit Ptah, the “first woman doctor,” was born of a 1938 mix-up
"The first woman physician and scientist." That is how Merit Ptah of ancient Egypt turns up in posts about women in STEM, in popular history books, even in computer games. A crater on Venus bears her name. In 2019 the medical historian Jakub Kwiecinski of the University of Colorado traced where she came from, and concluded that she probably never existed.
The trail leads to Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, a doctor and activist who set out to write the history of medical women around the world. Her 1938 book describes a tomb in the Valley of the Kings with a picture of a "Chief Physician" named Merit Ptah. The name Merit Ptah does occur in the Old Kingdom, but it is missing from every collated list of Egyptian healers. And the Valley of the Kings, where the story puts her son’s tomb, holds no Old Kingdom tombs at all. Kwiecinski thinks Hurd-Mead misread a report of a real find and got the name, the date and the place wrong.
The real woman is Peseshet. In 1929–30 excavators at Giza opened the tomb of Akhethetep, a courtier. On the false door in its chapel Peseshet appears with her husband, Kanefer, and Harvard's Giza Project translates her title as "overseer of female physicians." She was most likely the tomb owner's mother.
To Kwiecinski, Merit Ptah is still a very real symbol of the twentieth-century effort to write women back into history: second-wave feminism took her up, then Wikipedia, and a story about equal rights moved people enough to be retold again and again. Peseshet needs no one's faith. Her name is inscribed on a false door at Giza.
Sources
- Kwiecinski JM. Merit Ptah, “The First Woman Physician”: Crafting of a Feminist History with an Ancient Egyptian Setting. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2020; 75(1): 83–106. doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrz058
- Kelly D. Celebrated Ancient Egyptian Woman Physician Likely Never Existed, Says Researcher. CU Anschutz News, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, 18 December 2019.
- Giza Project at Harvard University. Peseshet (in G 8942). Digital Giza, Ancient People database (accessed 14 October 2026).