Arts, Western Sydney University. She has previously held positions at the University of Queensland and at the University of Sydney, as well as visiting research fellowships at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in Germany. She holds a UK AdvanceHE Senior Teaching Fellowship. She is author of Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism and Historical Teleology (2016) and co-author with Peter Cryle of Frigidity, an Intellectual History (2011).
Moore applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing: A History, and reported the following:
Page 99 is mostly footnotes with a short section of a longer paragraph where I am discussing some other scholars' views of two writers on whose work the chapter focuses heavily. The book does not do a lot of this kind of scholarly discussion, but here I had to engage with other scholars more because one of the individuals I am talking about, the late 18th-century medically-trained journalist Pierre Roussel, has been much written about (for reasons different to my own in this book, but with some overlapping concerns).Follow Alison M. Downham Moore on Twitter.
Alas the Page 99 Test does not work so well for this book. Page 99 is not very indicative of the book which spends much more time talking about nineteenth-century doctors and writers than it does talking about other recent scholars who have written on a related topic. The book does have a lot of footnotes, but page 99 is especially dominated by them!
This is a book that sought to understand how the term 'menopause' became an important topic of medicine and uncovered a richly complex untold story of how French medicine not only invented this term, but fundamentally altered the western biomedical frames that are still used today for differentiating men's and women's ageing. It traces several different conceptual threads that allowed doctors in France to define menopause, as well as several different pathways through which they made it matter to medicine of the 19th century. It also looks at how women health writers and novelists reacted to the cultural frames emerging in this time in relation to their ageing.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
