Under the direction of Jean-Paul Gaudillière
Menopausal hormone therapy is a medical practice whose relevance and usefulness have ebbed and flowed. Widely dispensed in the 1960’s, it has come under fire from American feminism in the context of criticism leveled against the contraceptive, estrogen pill during the following decade, before reemerging thanks to a new formulation as well as new medical arguments throughout the 80’s and 90’s. Prescribed to almost on in two postmenopausal women at the turn of the century in the US, the crisis of 2002 due to the results of the Women’s Health Initiative led to a change in recommendations stemming from various public health actors and a long-term transnational decrease in its consumption. In the line of works on French history of birth control and gynaecological organisation, based on biomedical and industrial archives in addition to a field study, this thesis aims to study this treatment’s trajectory as a gendered history of the medicalisation of aging and an example of drug regulation.
