CONCEPTUAL LAYERS IN THE INVENTION OF MENOPAUSE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

La menopause 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-sexspecific terms the 'critical age' and the 'age 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.