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 

Dr. Maud Menten, pioneer of enzyme kinetics, histochemistry, electrophoresis, adventurer and artist

Maud Menten, linocut 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2018

Canadian medical researcher Maud Menten (1870-1960) has been called the "grandmother of biochemistry" and "a radical feminist 1920s flapper," and a "petite dynamo." Not only was she an author of Michaelis-Menten equation for enzyme kinetics (like the plot in indigo in my portrait), she invented the azo-dye coupling for alkaline phosphatase, the first example of enzyme histochemistry,  still used in histochemistry imaging of tissues today (which inspired the histology background of the portrait), and she also performed the first electrophoretic separation of blood haemoglobin in 1944!

Born in Port Lambton, Ontario, she studied at the University of Toronto, earning her bachelor's in 1904, and then graduated from medical school (M.B., bachelor's of medicine) in 1907. She published her first paper with Archibald Macallum, the Professor of Physiology at U of T (who went on to set up the National Research Council of Canada), on the distribution of chloride ions in nerve cells in 1906. She worked a year at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where along with Simon Flexner, first director of the Institute, she co-authored a book on radium bromide and cancer, the first publication produced by the Institute - barely 10 years after Marie Curie had discovered radium. She completed the first of two fellowships at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University), then she earned a doctorate in medical research in 1911 at U of T. She was one of the first Canadian women to earn such an advanced medical degree.* She then moved to Berlin (travelling by boat, unfazed by the recent sinking of the Titanic) to work with Leonor Michaelis. Together they looked at enzyme-catalyzed reactions, found they occured at a rate proportional to the amount of the enzyme-substrate complex, and developed their famous equation for rate as a function of substrate. This work was critical to understanding how enzymes work and helped scientists develop means of blocking enzyme reactions (such as drugs like statins which inhibit enzymes which make cholesterol).

She returned to North America and studied cancer from 1913 to 1914 in laboratory of the great surgeon George W. Crile at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University), in Cleveland. She completed a second doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Chicago in 1916. She was unable to find any good research opportunities for women in Canada at the time, so in 1923 she joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh as a demonstrator in pathology and also served as a clinical pathologist at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. She held three positions at Children's Hospital involved: surgical pathologist, post-mortem pathologist, and haematologist. Despite holding these multiple demanding jobs she authored more than 100 papers. She discovered the utility of immunization of animals against infectious diseases. In 1944 she was the first to use electric fields to separate different proteins in a mixture based on size - a method called electrophoresis - to separate blood haemoglobin. Her wartime paper received far less attention than later work by Linus Pauling, to the point that this discovery is commonly misattributed to Pauling. Here is yet another example of the Matilda effect, where accomplishments of women in science are often forgotten and attributed to more famous men. This method remains a mainstay of lab techniques for biological systems. She characterised bacterial toxins from B. paratyphosus, Streptococcus scarlatina and Salmonella ssp. then successfully used in an immunisation program against scarlet fever in Pittsburgh during the 30's and 40's. Her research focused on pathology, nucleic acids, tumour cells, scarlet fever, bacterial toxins, and pneumonia. She was known as an outstanding hospital pathologist and teacher, who insisted on excellence in research and who had great compassion for the sick. In due course she was promoted to assistant professor (1923),  and associate professor (1925), but did not reach the rank of full professor until 1949 when she was 70, one year prior to retirement. She had retained her Canadian citizenship throughout her time abroad and on retirement promptly moved home to Canada, joined the British Columbia Medical Research Institute and worked three more years, as long as her health would allow. Arthritis forced her second retirement at 75 and she died at 81 in Leamington, Ontario, a 100 km from ber birthplace.

A painting by Maud Menten

Menten never married or had a family, as mothers were usually prohibited from research, but when not revolutionizing biochemistry and medicine she lead a very full life. She was notorious for driving her Model T Ford badly through the University of Pittsburgh campus from 1918 to 1950. She played the clarinet. She mastered six languages including Russian, French, German, Italian, and Halkomelem of the indigenous Coast Salish, which she learned from school friends during her teens in Harrison Mills, British Columbia, where her father was a ferry boat captain. She was a mountain climber and once went on an Arctic expedition. She was an avid amateur astronomer. I am most charmed that she is yet another example of a scientist who was also an artist. She was a talented oil painter, painting colourful and detailed landscapes, still-life works and florals and she exhibited her paintings.

The University of Pittsburgh, so slow to promote her to full professor, now has a yearly lecture and professorship named in her honour. In 1998 she was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame and has been honoured by a memorial plaque at the University of Toronto.  Her obituary in Nature, by Aaron H. Stock and Anna-Mary Carpenter states, "Menten was untiring in her efforts on behalf of sick children. She was an inspiring teacher who stimulated medical students, resident physicians and research associates to their best efforts. She will long be remembered by her associates for her keen mind, for a certain dignity of manner, for unobtrusive modesty, for her wit, and above all for her enthusiasm for research." It is astonishing that she is not a household name as her tremendous accompliments are still central to research today.

*There is some confusion about which degrees she earned, likely because the 1911 Doctor of Medicine degree (M.D.) - equivalent to today's PhD in medicine, was renamed a few years later when a first degree (previously a Bachelor's of Medicine or B.M.) in medicine became an M.D. degree. One source claims she earned three PhDs: in medicine, pathology and biochemistry.

References 

'A Moment in Canadian History' on the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame website, Dr. Maud Menten accessed April 12, 2018

'The Mystery of Maud Menten' on Laurence A. Moran's blog "Sandwalk: Strolling with a skeptical biochemist" accessed April 12, 2018

'Leonor Michaelis and Maud Leonora Menten', Science History Institude, accessed April 12, 2018

Nicolle Hodges, 'Maud Menten: Science Rules', Montecristo Magazine, accessed April 12, 2018

Maud Menten, Wikipedia, accessed April 12, 2018

Tonny Huang, 'Canadian Pioneers in Science: Maud Menten,' June 29, 2017

Rebecca Skloot, 'Pediatric Pathology - Some Called Her Miss Menten' from PITTMED, October 2000, Department of Pathology, University of Pittsburgh, accessed April 18, 2018

'Pediatric Pathology - About Maud L. Menten, MD, PhD,' Department of Pathology, University of Pittsburgh, accessed April 18, 2018

Kara Rogers, 'Maud Leonora Menten: Canadian biochemist and organic chemist'  Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Last Updated: 3-13-2018
 
'Menten, Maud L.' Encyclopedia of World Biography COPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc.

Susanna MacLeod 'I’ve stirred them up, so now I can go' Kingston Whig-Standard, Monday, March 4, 2013 11:20:07 EST AM

Athel Cornish-Bowden  and John Lagnad, 'A woman at the dawn of biochemistry: Maud Leonora Menten' December 2013 © Biochemical Society

Athel Cornish‐Bowden, 'Part 2: Maud Leonora Menten (1879–1960): her career as an experimental pathologist' in 'Commemorating the 1913 Michaelis–Menten paper Die Kinetik der Invertinwirkung: three perspectives' by Ute Deichmann, Stefan Schuster, Jean‐Pierre Mazat, and Athel Cornish‐Bowden in The FEBS Journal First published: 4 November 2013

https://doi.org/10.1111/febs.12598

Peter G. Mahaffy, Chemistry, Page 762, 2014 -

Maud L. Menten and George A. McCloskey, 'Histopathology and Etiology of Pneumonia in Children Dying after Antibacterial Therapy' Am J Pathol. 1951 Jun; 27(3): 477–491.