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

Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by French male 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 a...