[From "anni climacterici" to "menopause". The historical roots of the concept of "climacteric"].

In modern language, the term "climacteric" refers to what is more popularly called the "change of life" in English or "Wechseljahre" in German. As this paper demonstrates, the concept of "clim acteric" has a long but largely forgotten history, however, in the course of which the concept changed fundamentally. Originally, the "climacterical years" were simply the 7th, 14th, 21st years and so forth in the life of men and women alike. These "climacterical years" were associated with a "critical" change in the whole body, which could lead towards a further stage of renewed vigour and health but also towards death, especially in the 63rd year, the so called "annus climactericus maximus". The concept was well-known and widely debated and commented upon in the 16th and 17th centuries. By the 18th century it had lost much of its scientific credibility but eventually term "climacteric", rather than coming out of use, acquired a new meaning. Decisive for this process was a new understanding of the female menopause. Leading physicians, especially in France, reframed widely held traditional notions of the dangers of a "cessation of the menses". They no longer saw them as initiating a period of increasing decline due to the accumulation of superfluous or impure matter in the bodies of postmenopausal women. Instead they distinguished a specific period of troubles and danger in female life around the time when the periods stopped, which they called "menopause". Once this period of menopause was over a stage of renewed health and vigour was said to follow. Around the same time, English physicians began to describe a "climacteric disease" which commonly occurred roughly between 50 and 75 years of age, primarily though not exclusively in men. They thus still used the term "climacteric" but it no longer referred to individual, particularly dangerous years but, like the new term "menopause" to a more or less extended period in life. The two concepts gradually seem to have merged in the course of the 19th century. In the end, rather than suggesting a cyclical structure of crisis and renewal in human life, the term "climacteric" became a single, more or less extended, frequently quite troublesome but rarely lethal period in the life of women.