Article ID: CBB015280131

Conceptual layers in the invention of menopause in nineteenth-century France (2018)

unapi

La ménopause was a term invented to emphasize the non-pathological and strictly female nature of the cessation of menstruation. Post-revolutionary French medical faculties appeared intent on inducting certain student doctors with thesis topics focused on the scientific critique of supposedly traditional and irrational fears of the ‘critical age’. But from its first usage in French medical texts of the early nineteenth century, menopause connoted much more than this though its association with the competing and non-sex-specific terms the ‘critical age’ and the ‘âge de retour’ (‘the turn of age’). Menopause was a concept that transmitted multiple temporal layers from older medical views about the sexes. The new concept was an important tool for the creation of a professional identity that distinguished doctors of women’s health both as the true inheritors of ancient Hippocratic tradition and as the only legitimate scientific clinicians among the competing forces of folk medicine, midwifery and pharmacological charlatanism.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB015280131/

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Authors & Contributors
Houck, Judith A.
Cryle, Peter
Arena, Francesca
Lise Shapiro Sanders
Pamela K. Stone
Yeniyurt, Kathryn
Concepts
Medicine and gender
Women and health
Medicine
Menopause
Sex differences
Androgyny; hermaphroditism
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
20th century, early
18th century
21st century
20th century, late
Places
France
United States
Great Britain
England
Spain
Germany
Institutions
Medical Women's Federation (Great Britain)
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