What Exactly is Menopause?

Scientists have long known about the changes that women go through as they age. Aristotle noted that women could not get pregnant after 50 years of age and an English physician Thomas Sydenham way back in the 1600s observed that women were prone to hysterics around the age of 50 and concluded that intensive blood letting was the cure.

Yet it wasn’t until 1821 that someone finally gave it a name. French physician Charles Pierre Louis De Gardanne spent many years studying the symptoms women experienced as they aged. In an article, he dubbed it ‘De La menepausie,’ and the term has stuck. Should we be grateful to him for coining the term? Yes! This article started centuries of research, consideration, and supposed cures. Although there have been some horrific considerations – which included surgeries performed in the 1780s and institutionalization of menopausal women in the 1870s. 

Fortunately, the 20th Century saw many advances in understanding menopause and how to treat it. In 1929, Nobel-prize winner Edward Doisy isolated Estrogen and a short time later Estradiol – both sex hormones that play a huge role in women’s reproduction and aging. In 1930, perhaps the biggest breakthrough occurred when Bernhard Zondek discovered estrogen in the urine of pregnant mares. That urine paved the way for hormone replacement therapy.