| Popis: |
The final cessation of menses became medicalised in part through its marginal association with three categories of nervous pathologies which flourished in medical writing from the end of the seventeenth century, enduring into the nineteenth century: the vapours, hysteria, and hypochondria. These pathologies were not particularly thought to affect older women. Nonetheless, because nervous diseases were increasingly discussed in relation to young women’s menstruation, plethora, pre-menstrual times, pregnancy, and suppressed menses, post-menstruating women were sometimes also included in the grouping of states of uterine change which made women more susceptible to nervous and mental illness. Nervous diseases, it was thought, were a product of luxury and civilisation—urban life, stale air, sedentary lifeways, overeating, exotic foods and beverages, licentiousness, and corporeal laziness. Menopause medicine absorbed ideas about the confluence of uterine change with the effects of modern affluent lifeways previously elaborated in earlier works describing hysteria, hypochondria, and the vapours. A medical view emerged of urban elite women in modern France as generally more prone to nervous diseases during times of uterine change, including around the final cessation of menses, via the ‘sympathies’ of the uterus with the nervous system and the brain.Section Headings: • Uterine and Ovarian Reductionism • Vapours, Hysteria, and the Assemblage of Menopause • The Nineteenth-Century Assimilation of Vapours and Hysteria to Emerging Discourses of Menopause • The Emergence of Menopausal Nervous Pathology • Menopausal Hypochondria and Hysteria • The Longevity of Menopausal Nervous Pathologies |
