French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing : : A History / / Alison M. Downham Moore.

• VerfasserIn: Downham Moore, Alison M.,
• Place / Publishing House: Oxford : : Oxford University Press USA,, 2022.
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xii, 488 pages) :; illustrations
• Notes: Includes index.

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.

Table of Contents

Front Matter Copyright Page Acknowledgements List of Images Introduction: The Layering of Medical Concepts 1 Amenorrhea, Plethora, and the Final Cessation of Menses in Early Modern Medicine 2 Women's Life Expectancy, Cancer, and the Cessation of Menses 3 Crises, Critical Ages, and the 'Invention' of la Ménopause, c.1770-1812 4 Menstruation, Vapours, Hypochondria, and Hysteria 5 Women's Ageing and Medical Hygiene: Between Montpellier and Paris 6 Instrumentalising the Ancient Past and Folk Traditions: Hippocrates, Charlatans, and Purgatives in the Invention of Menopause 7 Menopause, Erotomania, and Degeneration in French Psychiatry 8 The First Discussions of Menopause in the Work of Women Medical and Health Writers in France 9 Women Writers' Fictional, Autobiographical, and Epistolary Responses to Medical Discourses About Women's Ageing, 1900-1930 10 Fibroids, Hysterectomy, and the Opotherapy-Surgical Technology Nexus Conclusion End Matter Bibliography Index.