Abstract: Merit Ptah is widely described as “the first woman physician and scientist” on the Internet and in popular history books. This essay explores the origins of this figure, showing that Merit Ptah came into being in the 1930s when Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead misinterpreted a report about an authentic ancient Egyptian healer. Merit Ptah gradually became a prominent figure in popular historical accounts during second-wave of feminism, and, in the twenty-first century she appeared in Wikipedia and subsequently spread throughout the Internet as a female (sometimes black African) founding figure. The history of Merit Ptah reveals powerful mechanisms of knowledge creation in the network of amateur historians, independently from the scholarly community. The case of Merit Ptah also pinpoints factors enabling the spread of erroneous historical accounts: the absence of professional audience, the development of echo chambers due to an obscured chain of knowledge transmission, the wide reach of the Internet, the coherence with existing preconceptions, the emotional charge of heritage, and even – in the case of ancient Egypt – the tendency to perceive certain pasts through a legendary lens. At the same time, the story of Merit Ptah reveals how important role models have been for women entering science and medicine.
CONCLUSION: IS SHE REAL?
The history of Merit Ptah provides no insight into ancient Egypt, but it could be a starting point for reflection on modern history-making practices. There is no single reason why an invented character, mentioned in a book nearly a century ago, has become a widespread piece of historic trivia. Instead, there is a tangle of explanations. Some of these are specific to the case of Merit Ptah, such as the peculiar popular perception of her ancient Egyptian setting. Others are generalizable for all kinds of amateur historymaking, popular memory, or even for mass-media news: the obscure chain of transmission, the spread outside the expert circles, the conformity to preexisting biases, and the association with emotionally-charged partisan issues. These facilitating factors – and some serendipity – turned the imaginary Merit Ptah into one of the few widely recognizable medical women of antiquity, obscuring her historically attested Egyptian colleagues.
Sometimes it is possible to separate different kinds of the past: the remembered (found in a popular memory), the recovered (a “history” reconstructed by scholars), or the invented (a past designed for a particular purpose).108 However, as the case of Merit Ptah illustrates, these kinds are intertwined more often than not. Invented and retold for a feminist purpose, her story was nevertheless created as a part of a recovery endeavor, and it eventually entered the collective memory. By collapsing the distinctions between different kinds of historical practice, and by straddling the divide between history and popular memory, the case of Merit Ptah demonstrates that “history is not the prerogative of the historian, nor even (...) a historian’s invention. It is, rather, a social form of knowledge.”109 Merit Ptah became famous not despite, but thanks to the amateur environment in which her story was curated. Developed by the interested parties in response to contemporary needs, her history fulfilled the demand for meaningful and usable past.
Merit Ptah’s story is a warning about over-reliance on secondary sources, and about misleading character of historical information in the Internet – including even seemingly well-sourced Wikipedia articles. At the same time, this story points to the way popular history authors can become influential creators of historical knowledge. It also showcases the power of Wikipedia and the Internet to spread this knowledge.
So is Merit Ptah “real”? From a strictly historical standpoint, she is not. No woman of this name was attested as a healer in ancient Egypt, and the entire story of Merit Ptah began in 1930s as a mistaken case of an authentic ancient Egyptian women healer, Peseshet. Yet throughout the nearly 100 years of her literary existence, Merit Ptah left a permanent mark on the world. Her namesake – the Venusian crater – is a lasting extraterrestrial geographical feature. At the same time, on planet Earth, Merit Ptah appears in the most diverse places, from computer games and superhero TV shows, through children’s adventure books, to names of medical social cooperatives and cancer-fighting societies.110 She inspired women to pursue careers in medicine and science. Her history, from the Hurd-Mead’s works to Internet blogs, tracks the evolution of the popular historiography of women’s achievements. She engaged with us in a way that most of past actors never did. Thus, while Merit Ptah is not an authentic ancient Egyptian character and not a good symbolic founding figure, she is a real symbol of the collective effort to write women back into history. She is a genuine hero of the modern feminist struggle.
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