Menopause is old. The word for it is not.
If you stand inside the historical record long enough, you start to see a pattern: women’s midlife transitions were often treated as something real but rarely centered. The “change” existed. The evidence exists. But it appears most often as labels in other people’s systems: medical books, newspapers, institutional records, and advertising.
This first entry is a clean starting point for The Menopause Archive: not the biology (which never changed), but the moment menopause became named, printable, and sellable.
In 1821, French physician Charles-Pierre-Louis de Gardanne published a work that used la ménopause and linked it to the “critical age” of women. Modern historians cite this moment as a key consolidation of terminology: many older phrases existed, but this naming helped standardize discussion in medical settings.
The experience predates the word. The word helped create a category that could travel through clinics, books, and eventually everyday culture.
By the mid-to-late 19th century, “the change of life” was widely legible in English-language print culture. Medical literature used it as a recognizable label for a cluster of symptoms and anxieties associated with midlife. A frequently cited example is Edward John Tilt’s 1871 book The Change of Life in Health and Disease, a practical treatise explicitly organized around “the change of life” as a life stage with potential disorders.
Menopause was framed for the public:
- not as a neutral transition,
- but as a risk-laden “critical” period that could be attached to almost anything: nerves, mood, bodily discomfort, moral judgments, even disease claims.