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Most historical studies on aging, gender and medicine have hitherto focused on menopausal women. There is comparatively little work on aging men and the contested idea of climacteric or "menopausal" men. This paper seeks to examine the male climacterium as a culturally and historically shaped idea in twentieth-century medicine. In the first part I shall map historical changes in understanding and defining the subject. In the second and third part, my main emphasis is put on answering the question: "What does it mean to write a cultural history of the male climacterium?" Drawing upon positions from cultural, gender and men's studies, I argue that the production of medical knowledge about the aging process of men is inevitably embedded in a cultural universe constituted by narratives, symbols, metaphors and images.

This paper discusses current issues of a cultural history of medicine. Based on selected examples from the history of bodies, gender and experience, and visual cultures, the paper invites historians of medicine to become more deeply engaged with cultural historical approaches.