25. Menopause and medicine

Published: March 17, 2009, 12:11 a.m.

Louise Foxcroft: Hot Flushes, Cold Science “There was a physician called John Fothergill in the late eighteenth century who said that it was amazing that women had been taught to dread this natural phenomenon.” As Louise Foxcroft’s sometimes shocking history of the menopause shows, Fothergill was very much in the minority. The medical profession in Fothergill’s day was just beginning to cotton on to the idea that the menopause offered a lucrative new subject for treatment. Earlier centuries had viewed the cessation of female fertility as also marking the end of a woman’s meaningful existence, but the medical profession saw in what came to be called the menopause a business opportunity. If the menopause was pathologized – treated like a disease rather than a process – then medics were on hand to offer a cure, or at least a course of treatment. This was not, of course, the result of some deliberate policy so much as the outcome of the increasing professionalization of medicine, the growth of an affluent middle class, and an underlying misogyny …