Social History of Medicine Advance Access originally published online on May 21, 2008
Social History of Medicine 2008 21(2):329-344; doi:10.1093/shm/hkn029
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Medicine, Masculinity, and the Disappearance of Male Menopause in the 1950s
* History of Health Sciences Program, Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, 3333 California Street, suite 485, San Francisco, CA 94143–0850, USA. E-mail: watkinse{at}dahsm.ucsf.edu
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Abstract |
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In an earlier article, I described how the topic of male menopause lived on in the popular press from the mid-1950s through the mid-1990s in spite of its contemporary absence from the medical literature. The present article addresses the question of why male menopause vanished from medical discourse in the 1950s. This disappearance offers an interesting case study of how and why diagnoses and therapies fall in and out of favour. For this particular set of symptoms, psychiatry replaced endocrinology as the explanatory framework, and tranquilisers replaced hormones as the preferred therapy. But medical fashion was not the only factor determining diagnosis and treatment. In the 1950s, when the dominant model of masculinity clearly differentiated men from women, male patients and their male physicians alike balked at the idea that men could suffer from what seemed like a woman's problem, namely, menopause. The diagnosis of a stress-induced condition fitted better with the image of the hardworking breadwinning male, especially among middle-aged men who might also have worried about becoming superannuated. Cultural conceptions of masculinity and ageing figured significantly in the framing of this condition.
Keywords: male menopause; andropause; climacteric; testosterone; hormone replacement therapy; anxiety; stress; tranquilisers; masculinity; ageing