The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing

Abstract

Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by Frenchmen 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 book 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 also 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.

Invloedrijke stemmen. Patiëntenverhalen uit het Johns Hopkins ziekenhuis rond 1900

“…Omstreeks 1900 bevonden zij zich in een ongelijkwaardige onderhandelingspositie in Amerikaanse en Europese ziekenhuizen. 22 Een opname in het ziekenhuis betekende een nieuwe, onbekende omgeving waarin patiënten grotendeels afhankelijk werden van de zorgen en informatie van artsen. In hun publicatie schreven Kelly en Cullen dat gynaecologen patiënten grondig moesten inlichten over de voor-en nadelen van operaties.…”

Is it time to rethink how menopause is defined?

“…The term menopause ("Mens" for month and "Pausis," to pause), defined by the permanent absence of menstruation, was coined by French physician Charles-Pierre-Louis de Gardanne in the 1820s. 1 His writings spurred the publication of at least 40 new books and theses focused on menopause over the next four decades. He gets credit for calling attention to the change in a woman's hormonal and reproductive status but has been widely criticized since he emphasized that this "critical time" was an inevitable entry into disease and decline.…”