Title The French invention of menopause and the medicalisation of women's ageing : a history / Alison M. Downham Moore

Edition First edition Published Oxford ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2022 ©2022

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 488 pages) : illustrations Summary "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"--Publisher's description Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on online resource; title from home page (Oxford Academic, viewed on November 17, 2023) Subject Menopause -- France -- History -- 19th century Women -- Health and hygiene -- France -- History -- 19th century Medical literature -- France -- History and criticism Medical innovations -- France -- History -- 19th century Medicalization -- France -- History -- 19th century Medical innovations Medical literature Menopause Women -- Health and hygiene Clinical & internal medicine. Health and Wellbeing. France Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780191925528 0191925527 9780192654526 0192654527 9780192654533 0192654535

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