The French elaboration of ideas about menopause, sexuality and ageing 1805-1920

This article considers a range of moral views about sexuality and menopause espoused both by doctoral candidates and mature clinicians in France throughout the long nineteenth century. While the English physician John Fothergill was the first to author an article on the cessation of menses, it was French doctors who invented the word la ménopause, and who elaborated it profusely throughout the nineteenth century, while other medical cultures remained largely silent on the matter until the early twentieth century. The phenomenon of women living beyond reproductive age was not historically novel in this time, and anthropologists note that even in subsistence hunter-gather societies, more than thirty per cent of women live old enough to undergo menopause. Rising life-expectancies in France from the end of the eighteenth century reflected improved infant survival, particularly following the introduction of the small-pox vaccine in 1810, rather than most adults living any longer. So the sudden appearance of a medical literature on menopause around this time certainly warrants explanation. In another paper, I consider some of these broader questions at greater length. Here, I focus on how the French medical elaboration of menopause treated matters of sexuality.