Peseshet

Peseshet was a woman who lived in Egypt's Old Kingdom, in the Fourth Dynasty or possibly the Fifth, known from an inscription on a false door found in a mastaba at Giza believed to belong to her son. She held the title lady overseer of the female physicians, among other honorifics, which points to real administrative authority over women's medical practice in her era, though whether she practiced medicine herself is not established by the surviving evidence. She is often described as the earliest known female physician, a distinction sometimes wrongly credited instead to a supposed figure named Merit-Ptah, whose story appears to have been invented in the twentieth century by closely echoing Peseshet's own attested details.