Peseshet, Actual Earliest Named Woman in Science or Medicine, Ancient Egyptian Overseer of the Female Physicians

 

Peseshet, Overseer of Physicians, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2020

Ada, Countess Lovelace, 3rd edition linocut by Ele Willoughby

 

 

It is once again Ada Lovelace Day, the 12th annual international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology, science and math, Ada Lovelace Day 2019 (ALD19). I'm sure you'll all recall, Ada, brilliant proto-software engineer, daughter of absentee father, the mad, bad, and dangerous to know, Lord Byron, she was able to describe and conceptualize software for Charles Babbage's computing engine, before the concepts of software, hardware, or even Babbage's own machine existed! She foresaw that computers would be useful for more than mere number-crunching. For this she is rightly recognized as visionary - at least by those of us who know who she was. She figured out how to compute Bernouilli numbers with a Babbage analytical engine. Tragically, she died at only 36. Today, in Ada's name, people around the world are blogging.

You can find my previous Ada Lovelace Day posts here. 

One of the things that has become very clear, participating in a dozen years of Ada Lovelace events, is not only that there has long been a large collection of under-recognized women in the history of science and technology, who need to be written back into the story, but that there is a large appetite for these stories. Representation matters. Women in STEM and girls who love science and technology are seeking evidence of precedence (of foremothers in science). So much so, that scientists and amateur historians are themselves seeking out stories and evidence of women trailblazers. Thus, when Canadian feminist medical doctor Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead (1867 – 1941), likely made an innocent error, misinterpreting a report and conflating two people, she accidentally started the paper trail for an non-existent ancient woman in medicine: Merit Ptah, reputedly the earliest recorded woman in medicine and subject of one of my portraits. Hurd-Mead confused the Overseer of Healer Woman that did exist, Peseshet (5th Dynasty, 2465-2323 BCE), with a name, tomb location and date for someone a bit earlier, giving this conflation of people "Merit Ptah" priority. Thus "Merit Ptah" became a bit of a feminist hero, and for instance, The International Astronomical Union even named the impact crater Merit Ptah on Venus after her. While "Merit Ptah" was not what she appeared, the idea that women have played a role in science and medicine since ancient times is quite true. Specifically, there is hard evidence both that medicine in ancient Egypt was was quite advanced for the ancient world, and admired by people from contemporary civilizations and that women participated in this work. Physicians, even in the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, while also often a sort of priest whose roll involved their religious beliefs and sympathetic magic, and quite different from our modern understanding of the role, did practise some things we would still recognize as science-based medicine. Specifically, we know Peseshet lived and worked as the Overseer of Women Physicians from a specifical inscription on her son's tomb.

 

Depiction of the Stela of the lady Peseshet from John F. Nunn, Acient Egyptian Medicine,
University of Oklahoma Press, 2002

 

The word for doctor is swnw (or swnwt for a woman; the suffix -t makes a word feminin, the way -e can make the feminine form of a French word) and is sometimes simplified as just the arrow symbol, indicating that doctors were initially the arrow-pullers, the people who treated those injured in battle. The name Peseshet is shown with the arrow hieroglyph in three separate places in the tomb of her son Akhet-hotep, a royal official and overseer of priests, who lived during the 5th Dynasty around 2400 BCE, and had an elaborate tomb build in the necropolis at Saqqara. Compassion for the suffering was an important moral consideration as they believed they would be judged on their morality through life when they reached the afterlife. Curing a patient would increase a doctor's standing but failing to do so was not viewed as a moral failing. They had no concept of the germ theory of disease, but luckily cleanliness was demanded of the priestly class and Egyptians in general bathed and purified their bodies often, and shaved their body hair as a means to fend off disease. Both surgery and prosthetics were part of ancient Egyptian medicine. There is a beautiful relief from the Temple of Kom Ombo showing surgical instruments, but this was made thousands of years after Peseshet's time. The oldest surgical tools discovered are from the 6th Dynasty. The mummification and ritual autopsy of human and animal corpses meant that ancient Egyptians had an extensive understanding of anatomy and generally managed to correctly infer the roles of major organs (though famously not the brain). They did prescribe medicines (which helps document their treatments and ancient pharmaceuticals). They are known to have used 160 distinct plant products for their medicinal uses.Some of the other earliest doctors recorded were moreorless contemporaries of Peseshet. Polymath Imhotep (late 27th century BCE) was ultimately deified and the Greeks identified him with their own god of medicine, Asklepios, so it is assumed he was a physician, though there is little hard evidence of this. Hesy-Ra (3rd Dynasty, 2687-2649 BCE) lived roughly the same time and is identified as both official and dentist. The fact that there were dentists at this time gives us a hint that there were already different medical specialists. Others include ophthalmologist, gastroenterologist, and proctologist; midwives were separate from doctors and were all female.  I think this indicates enough overlap with our own ideas about science and medicine to legitimately recognize Peseshet as an ancient trailblazer and woman in STEM.

 

I think this animation is a bit speculative, as the inscription above are all the specifics about Peseshet's life, but it does help bring to life how the Ancient Egyptian doctors did do things we expect doctors to do, such as dispense medicines, study anatomy, keep records, study and teach existing medical knowledge, but also involved their religious beliefs and sympathetic magic.

I made this new portrait of Peseshet, adapting my previous portrait of "Merit Ptah". The hieroglyphs indicate who she is (in fuschia) and her role. I have taken some artistic license and hope that this is reasonably accurate. Luckily for me, ancient Egyptians were not hung up on careful spelling and were pretty flexible in their use of hieroglyphics, so I hope that my combination gleaned from different sources is reasonably accurate. The rest of the hieroglyphs read "wer swnwt per aa" where "wer" means chief and I believe can be indicated by the swallow, "swnwt" is the feminine form of doctor, indicated by the arrow, pot and half-circle (for the feminine -t suffix), and "per aa" means great house or palace (the sort of rectangle with a opening is house and the last irregular shape indicated great).

 

References

 

Jakub Kwiecinski, '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, Volume 75, Issue 1, January 2020, Pages 83–106, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrz058

Published: 22 November 2019 

 

Michelle Star, 'The Story of That Famous Female Physician From Ancient Egypt Is Actually Wrong, ' Science Alert, 17 DECEMBER 2019

 

John F. Nunn, Acient Egyptian Medicine, University of Oklahoma Press, 2002  

 

Merit Ptah, wikipedia entry accessed March, 2018 and October 2020
 

Méryt-Ptah (médecin dans l'Égypte antique), wikipedia entry accessed March, 2018
 

27th-century BC women,  wikipedia entry accessed March, 201827th-century BC women, 
 

Ancient Egyptian Clothing,  wikipedia entry accessed March, 2018
 

Ancient Egyptian Costume History, Decoration and Coloring,  Costume and fashion history. Traditional Historical clothes, accessed March 2018
 

Tom Tierney, Ancient Egyptian Fashions, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover. p. 2. ISBN 9780486408064.
 

Ancient Egyptian Medicine, wikipedia entry accessed March 2018
 

Ancient Egyptian Medicine, from Ancient Egypt Online, accessed March, 2018
 

Aleksandrovna, J.O and Lvovna, M.G, The Social status of physicians in Ancient Egypt. Istoriya meditsiny (History of Medicine), 2015. Vol 2, No. 1, pp. 55-71.
 

Histoire de la médecine en Egypte ancienne, website accessed March, 2018
 

J.F. Nunn, The doctor in Ancient Egypt 
 

John F. Nunn, Ancient Egyptian Medicine, University of Oklahoma Press, 2002
 

Bruno Halioua, and Bernard Ziskind, Medicine in the Days of the Pharaohs, London Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2005. ISBN: 0674017021 9780674017023
 

H.W. Jansen, A History of Art, 3rd Edition, Harry N. Abrams, 1986 

Finding our predecessors as women in STEM, Pitfalls and Mistaken Identity of Merit Ptah

Merit Ptah, Chief Physician, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2018

An astronomy professor of mine memorably told our class that Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a dwell over a "woman of ill repute" - while colourful, this isn't true. The aristocrat Brahe was not supposed to marry a commoner, but he did, and she, like his sister, was involved in his scientific enterprise and does not deserve to be remembered vaguely and inaccurately as a "woman of ill repute".

Being a woman on the Internet, sometimes I receive none-too-polite "corrections" to history of science I present. Once I posted on Twitter about Marie Tharp and how she found the Mid-Atlantic ridge. I got a blunt reply from a professor of crystallography that this knowledge predates her by centuries. He was wrong. He was confusing knowledge of the rise (the geographic feature indeed known in broad strokes for centuries) with knowledge of the ridge (which is a geophysical feature where we now know new crust is born) which helped usher in the plate tectonics revolution in the latter part of the twentieth century. The fact that my doctorate in marine geophysics is a lot closer in subject matter than his did not protect me from being chastised, publicly, and wrongly. But, I am keenly aware that scientists themselves are not always the most accurate re-tellers of the history of science, and that we can fall into the pitfalls of repeating misinformation provided by fellow scientists. Sometimes, we can't resist a good story.

I was once told one of my scientist portraits was "an insult" because, though I had used several references, my anonymous critic has correctly inferred I had included a portrait of the subject's sister-in-law (which can be commonly found online, mislabelled as the scientist herself). While dismayed, I don't think this strident critic was reasonable or communicating productively. I used the incorrectly labelled portrait mainly as a reference for her clothing, so I think my error is regretable but not historically misleading. Sadly this critic's antagonism is all too common online.

In complete contrast, I'm quite impressed at the kindness and consideration of a recent message I received from medical historian Jakub Kwiecinski who has been researching Merit Ptah, reputedly the earliest recorded woman in medicine and subject of one of my portraits. He wrote me to say though he's a fan of my portrait (and has bought two), he's quite certain she didn't exist! He generously assumed I suspected as much. To be honest, I did not, but as I wrote about her here I was clear that information about her online was surprisingly thin, repetitive and often inaccurate. I had seen that the same information was repeated again and again, without ever seeming to find anything independent. I had also noted that there were no credible images of her, which seemed weird since there was allegedly an inscription about her made by her son. I also noted the existence of other documented near-contemporary ancient Egyptian doctors. I hadn't concluded that in fact this self-referential nest of authors citing each other was all perpetuating an untrue story. He included his article on the subject, where he carefully traces all information about her back to a single source from almost a century ago. He explains why it appeared that there were independent sources and gives a very credible explanation how the author who introduced her, Canadian feminist medical doctor Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, likely made an innocent error, misinterpreting a report and conflating two people. The healer and Overseer of Healer Woman that did exist was  Peseshet (5th Dynasty, 2465-2323, later than supposed for Merit Ptah). Since the name, tomb location and date were confused with someone a bit earlier, that gave "Merit Ptah" priority. Kwiecinski's article is one half detective story, showing how all online sources and even published popular histories are interconnected and link back to Hurd-Mead and how she likely misinterpreted a report about Peseshet. The second half is a study of the role of popular histories, and how "Merit Ptah" became a feminist hero. While pointing out the dangers of secondary sources, and how amateur historians or scientists seeking female predecessors in their fields have different interests than historians (none of whom had written about Merit Ptah) the article doesn't chastise those who did write about Merit Ptah. Instead, it documents how the supposed existence of this doctor, has been very important to contemporary women in science and medicine. I, and this blog, actually make a cameo appearance in his article. As mentioned in footnote 87, my post was apparently the only one he found which cast doubt on Merit Ptah, pointing out that online images that purport to be her are clearly mislabelled (either men, or another woman who was named Merit Ptah who lived a full millennium later).  I'm tickled to have been cited in this scholarly publication for actually looking at online images and information with a critical eye!

The article 'Merit Ptah, “The First Woman Physician”: Crafting of a Feminist History with an Ancient Egyptian Setting' in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences is paywalled though the abstract is here. But the story has been picked up by the press, for instance this National Post article where Kwiecinski argues, “She is a very real symbol of the 20th-century feministic struggle to write women back into the history books, and to open medicine and STEM to women.”

So now, I have to figure out what to do with my portrait. As a print, I think it works. But, I don't want to perpetuate misconceptions. I could reimagine her as a symbol of legendary predecessors, of the feminist drive to point out that women did play a role in many historical endeavours, including science, though they have been left out of the story, rather than a portrait of an actual documented individual. I could also revise the print, change the hieroglyphics and making my Old Kingdom female doctor into Peseshet. Interestingly, I was able to find the actual inscription about Peseshet online. What to do when your historical portrait turns out to be of an imaginary person is an interesting problem. I think I might do both. I will continue to make the remaining Merit Ptah prints available, with a new description and I may also carve a new ancient Egyptian incription and print a second print with my doctor with real text which was written about a real woman Peseshet. What would you do?

Depiction of the Stela of the lady Peseshet from John F. Nunn, Acient Egyptian Medicine,
University of Oklahoma Press, 2002