Sexual Ageing in the History of Medicine

This individual research project of Alison Downham Moore, funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant (2019-2022), focuses on the historically specific ways in which sexual and reproductive ageing is understood in our own time, via the retrieval of past medical concepts that have shaped our current modes of thought.

It aims to show how our current understandings of sexual ageing came into existence throughout a process of scientific discovery and conceptual sorting that took place in 3 stages: 1) in French, German and British medicine from 1700-1870, 2) in several European cultures (especially French, British, American and Spanish) between 1870-1950, and 3) proliferating globally from the end of the twentieth century to the present. The term ‘sexual ageing’ is used here to refer to a range of ideas that existed concurrently from the early nineteenth century onwards, including menopause, andropause, the ‘critical age’, l’âge de retour (‘the turning age’) or the ‘climacteric’ – all terms which described either loss of reproductive capacity, loss of sexual desire, genital atrophy, age-related impotence or frigidity, or the loss of general health deemed resultant from changes in sexual physiology.

The project aims to produce the first history of medical ideas about ‘sexual ageing’ and is innovative in framing the question according to this broad set of parameters that more accurately reflects how ideas about it were conceived throughout the historical period in question.

The project is primarily (though not exclusively) focused on France because it was there, in the nineteenth century, that some of our most important concepts of sexual ageing were substantially elaborated. The term ‘menopause’ was a French invention and throughout the nineteenth century, medical research on sexual ageing was heavily dominated by France, only disseminating gradually to other parts of Western Europe and to the US over the second half the nineteenth century, and only becoming a major topic of international medical inquiry in the early twentieth century. After this, France remained a major contributor to medical ideas on sexual ageing until the Second Wold War, after which it was eclipsed by the burgeoning of sexsteroid- hormone research in the US and elsewhere.

One of the aims of the project is to show how medical thought on sexual ageing changed, firstly because of the growth of French medicine after the French Revolution until the 1890s, then across Europe and the US following the discovery of sex steroid hormones from the 1890s-1940s, and then again as a result of the new emphasis on hormone replacement therapies (HRT) in post-war international clinical practice, focused both on ageing populations and on transgender people.

Outcomes of the project include:

1. A large monograph by Alison Downham Moore, which is now published by Oxford University Press. Details here and pre-purchase here.
2. Methodological journal articles by Alison Downham Moore. See here.
3. A pedagogic journal publication working with a postgraduate candidate. See here.
4. This website!
5. A journal special edition edited by Alison Downham Moore and Sarah Lamb. See call for papers here.