The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women’s Ageing: A History

Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by French male medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of doctors’ professional identities in postrevolutionary biomedicine. Older women were identified as an important patient cohort for the expanding medicalisation of French society and were advised to entrust themselves to the hygienic care of doctors in managing the whole era of life from around and after the final cessation of menses. However, menopause owed much of its conceptual weft to earlier themes of women as the sicker sex, of vitalist crisis, of the vapours, and of astrological climacteric years.

This is the first comprehensive study of the origins of the medical concept of menopause, richly contextualising its role in nineteenth-century French medicine and revealing the complex threads of meaning that informed its invention. It tells a complex story of how women’s ageing featured in the demographic revolution in modern science, in the denigration of folk medicine, in the unique French field of hygiène, and in the fixation on women in the emergence of modern psychiatry. It reveals the nineteenth-century French origins of the still-current medical and alternative-health approaches to women’s ageing as something to be managed through gynaecological surgery, hormonal replacement, and lifestyle intervention.

Alison M. Downham Moore, Associate Dean of Research and Associate Professor of History and Medical Humanities, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University

Alison M. Downham Moore is a historian and medical humanities scholar. She is Associate Dean of Research in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University. She has previously held positions at the University of Queensland and at the University of Sydney, as well as visiting research fellowships at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in Germany. She holds a UK AdvanceHE Senior Teaching Fellowship. She is author of Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism and Historical Teleology (2016) and co-author with Peter Cryle of Frigidity, an Intellectual History (2011).