How Did Menopause Get Medicalized?

Guest Bio: Elizabeth Watkins

Elizabeth Watkins became Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor at UC Riverside on May 1, 2021. Watkins came to UC Riverside from UC San Francisco, where she served as the Dean of the Graduate Division, Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, and Professor of History of Health Sciences. Watkins earned both her BA in Biology and Ph.D. in the History of Science at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the interrelations of medicine, science, commerce, and culture in the U.S. in the twentieth—twenty-first centuries, and she has published on the topics of the history of prescription drugs; birth control; estrogen and female aging; testosterone and male aging; and stress and disease. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Library of Medicine, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education. She is the author of On the Pill:  A Social History of Oral Contraceptives and The Estrogen Elixir:  A History of Hormone Replacement Therapy in America and co-editor of Medicating Modern America:  A History of Prescription Drugs; Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America; and Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century.