In the first complete history of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), Elizabeth Siegel Watkins illuminates the complex and changing relationship between the medical treatment of menopause and cultural conceptions of aging. Describing the development, spread, and shifting role of HRT in America from the early twentieth century to the present, Watkins explores how the interplay between science and society shaped the dissemination and reception of HRT and how the medicalization—and subsequent efforts toward the demedicalization—of menopause and aging affected the role of estrogen as a medical therapy. Telling the story from multiple perspectives—physicians, pharmaceutical manufacturers, government regulators, feminist health activists, and the media, as well as women as patients and consumers—she reveals the striking parallels between estrogen’s history as a medical therapy and broad shifts in the role of medicine in an aging society. Today, information about HRT is almost always accompanied by a laundry list of health risks. While physicians and pharmaceutical companies have striven to develop the safest possible treatment for the symptoms of menopause and aging, many specialists question whether HRT should be prescribed at all. Drawing from a wide range of scholarly research, archival records, and interviews, The Estrogen Elixir provides valuable historical context for one of the most pressing debates in contemporary medicine.
Fame is notoriously fickle. Her methods are many and varied, and all do not receive a like treatment at her hands. The names of those who have done the most, by laborious and scientific pursuits, alike injurious to their health and happiness, to smooth the thorny paths of their fellow-creatures, are perhaps allowed to lapse into utter oblivion. While others, whose claim to immortality rests on a more slender base, are celebrated among their posterity. Lady Holland’s claim to renown rests upon the later years of her life. She is known to the readers of memoirs and historical biographies of her time as the domineering leader of the Whig circle; as a lady whose social talents and literary accomplishments drew to her house the wits, the politicians, and the cognoscenti of the day. She is known as the hostess who dared to give orders to such guests as Macaulay and Sydney Smith, and, what is more, expected and exacted implicit obedience. As yet, however, little has been written of her earlier years, and on these her Journal will throw much light. It is a record of the years of her unhappy marriage to Sir Godfrey Webster; and after her marriage with Lord Holland the narrative is continued with more or less regularity until 1814. The chief point which at once strikes home in reading the account of her younger days is an entire absence of any system of education, to use the words in their modern application. Everything she learnt was due to her own exertions. She did not receive the benefit of any course of early teaching to prepare her to meet on equal terms the brightest stars of a period which will compare favourably with any other in the annals of this country for genius and understanding. ‘My principles were of my own finding, both religious and moral, for I never was instructed in abstract or practical religion, and as soon as I could think at all chance directed my studies.... Happily for me, I devoured books, and a desire for information became my ruling passion.’ Her own words thus describe how she gained the general knowledge which was subsequently of such use to her. Lectures on geology, courses of chemistry with the savants whom she met on her travels, and hours of careful reading snatched whenever practicable, seem to have been the solace and the recreation of those early years of her married life. By her own efforts she thus became fitted, with the aid of undoubted beauty and a natural liveliness of disposition, to take her place in Whig society, into which her marriage with Lord Holland had thrown her. Without the same opportunities, her salon in later days succeeded and far surpassed in interest that presided over by the beautiful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Thus said Charles Greville: ‘Tho’ everybody who goes there finds something to abuse or to ridicule in the mistress of the house, or its ways, all continue to go. All like it more or less; and whenever, by the death of either, it shall come to an end, a vacuum will be made in society which nothing can supply. It is the house of all Europe; the world will suffer by the loss; and it may be said with truth that it will “eclipse the gaiety of nations.”’ But her sway over her associates was the rule of fear, not of love; and with age the imperiousness of her demeanour to her intimates grew more marked. Each one of her visitors was liable to become a target for the venom of her wit or the sharpness of her tongue.
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