Amenorrhea, Plethora, and the Final Cessation of Menses in Early Modern Medicine

Abstract

Abstract This chapter surveys seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Latin and French scholars who first identified the cessation of menstruation due to age, evaluating claims made by other historians who have attributed menopause symptomatology to ancient and early modern medicine. Early modern physicians, for the most part, simply did not consider the end of menses a matter of medical concern at all. Nineteenth-century doctors in general made great mileage of their supposed inheritance from ancient medicine, even as they radically displaced many of its central presuppositions. However, ancient medicine of women’s health was innovatively reimagined between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in ways that neither Hippocrates nor Galen would have recognised. The pathological view of menopause was a novel, mostly French confection of the long nineteenth century which has too often been assumed to derive from ancient and early modern lineages. Section Headings: • The Early Modern Naturalisation of the Final Cessation of Menses • Menstruation and Its End from Iatrochemical to Iatromechanical Perspectives • The Influence of the Halle School? • Midwives and Accoucheurs