Abstract
Alison M. Downham Moore has written a superb and impressive book on how French medical practitioners invented the category of menopause over the long nineteenth century and systemically medicalised views on how women aged biologically and mentally, turning this issue into an expansive field of research and practice. As Downham Moore persuasively argues, French doctors did more than create a medical subfield, defining its terms and techniques: they also dominated it for over a century, strongly influencing broader discourses on women’s ageing, health, and sexuality throughout the Western world. In making her arguments, Downham Moore draws upon a wealth of printed primary sources and carefully reconstructs how doctors crafted hygienic, therapeutic and surgical responses to perceived medical needs. In key ways, medical personnel contributed to the unique political, cultural, and social conditions within post-Revolutionary France, especially on the so-called ‘woman question’, so brilliantly analysed by Karen Offen, which dominated how social elites spoke about women’s citizenship, reproduction and domestic roles. In many ways, Downham Moore’s is a definitive study.