A Medical and Cultural History of Male Aging

FAIN: FB-54613-10

Elizabeth Siegel Watkins
Regents of the University of California, Riverside (San Francisco, CA 94143-2203)

The main objective of this project is to produce a historical study of male menopause in medical thought and popular culture in the twentieth century. This work will contribute to scholarship on the history of gender and medicine by investigating the interactions between medicine and culture in the development of historically contingent approaches to masculine aging. It uses the methodologies of intellectual and cultural history to analyze the meanings of male menopause as a window onto the complexities of changing expectations and changing roles for medicine in mediating aging in modern society.