Some have credited Merit-Ptah with being the first female physician, but she is likely a fictional creation based upon Peseshet.
[6] She is believed to have had a son, Akhethetep, in whose mastaba at Giza her personal false door was found.
Akhethetep and Kanefer were both high-ranking individuals who lived during the fourth dynasty of Egypt and served as officers.
[citation needed] Peseshet's history plays a key role in the 2009 novel Storm Cycle by Roy and Iris Johansen, which tells the story of an archaeologist seeking to obtain and sell cures and treatments that the novel's Peseshet is said to have discovered, and of a researcher whose only hope of saving her sister may lie in one of those cures.
In 1938, Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead wrote of an ancient Egyptian female physician named Merit-Ptah.