Today, the term “climacteric” refers to what is more commonly called the “change of life” in English. As this paper demonstrates, the concept of “climacteric” has a long and largely forgotten history, however, in the course of which it underwent drastic changes. Originally, the “climacteric years” were simply the 7th, 14th, 21st years, and so forth in the life of men and women alike. These “climacteric years” were associated with a “critical” change in the whole body, which could lead toward a subsequent stage of renewed vigor and health but also toward 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 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but by the eighteenth century it had lost much of its scientific credibility. In a parallel development, around 1800, “menopause”, that is the cessation of the periods, came to be understood as a time of many troubles and great danger and English physicians described a “climacteric disease” which they commonly found in people of roughly between 50 and 75 years of age and primarily but not exclusively in men. The two concepts gradually seem to have merged and, 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.