Mother Mourning: Childbed Fever in Tudor Times

Black death. The Great Pestilence. Plague. Sweating Sickness. The very words themselves cause us to shudder, and they certainly caused those in centuries past to quake because they and their loved ones were often afflicted by those diseases.  But when we survey the physical ailments that afflicted sixteenth century women there is one death that caused the deepest fear among women: Childbed Fever, also known as Puerperal Fever and later called The Doctors' Plague.

Medieval and Tudor medicine centered around both astrology and the common belief that all health and illness was contained in balance or imbalance of the four "humours" of bodily fluids: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm.  Therefore, the letting of blood or sniffing of urine were common manners to address or diagnose illness. Although it seems ludicrous to us today, this understanding of medicine had reigned supreme for nearly 2000 years, coming down from Greek and Roman philosophical systems. It's been said that perhaps only 10-15% of those living in the Tudor era made it past their fortieth birthday. Common causes of illness leading to death? Lack of hygiene and sanitation.

Elizabeth of York

Decades before the germ theory was validated in the late nineteenth century,  Hungarian physician Ignac Semmelweis noticed that women who gave birth at home had a lower incidence of childbed fever than those who gave birth in hospitals. Statistics showed, "Between 1831 and 1843, only 10 mothers per 10,000 died of puerperal fever when delivered at home ... while 600 per 10,000 died on the wards of the city's General Lying In Hospital."[1] Higher-born women, those with access to expensive doctors, suffered from childbed fever more frequently than those attended by midwives who saw fewer patients and not usually one after another.

In 1795 Dr. Alexander Gordon wrote, "It is a disagreeable declaration for me to mention that I myself was the means of carrying the infection to a great number of women."[2]  Although they did not realize it at the time, it was, in fact, the sixteenth-century doctors themselves who were transmitting death and disease to delivering mothers because the doctors did not disinfect their hands or tools, in-between patients.  

Queen Jane Seymour

Because illnesses are often transmitted via germs, doctors (and busy midwives) could infect young mothers one after another, most often with what is now known as staph or strep infection in the uterine lining.  Semmelweis discovered that using an antiseptic wash before assisting in the delivery of the mother cut the incidence of Childbed Fever by at least 90% and perhaps as much as 99%, but his findings were soundly rejected.  Infected women had no antibiotics to stop the onslaught of familiar symptoms once they began: fever, chills, flu-like symptoms, a terrible headache, foul discharge, distended abdomen, and occasionally, loss of sanity just before death. 

Katherine Parr

This kind of death was no respecter of persons, as mentioned above, it perhaps struck the highborn more frequently than the lowborn. In fact, fear of childbed fever is often mentioned when discussing Elizabeth I's reluctance to marry and bear children.  In the Tudor era Elizabeth of York, the mother of Henry VIII, died of Childbed Fever, as did two of Henry's wives: Queen Jane Seymour and Queen Katherine Parr, though her child was fathered by her fourth husband, Thomas Seymour.  Parr's deathbed scene is perhaps one of the most chilling death accounts of the century, beheadings included. 

Although Semmelweis was outcast from the community of physicians for his implication that they themselves were the transmitters of disease, ultimately, science and modern medicine prevailed.   Today, in the developed world, few of the newly delivered die due to Puerperal Fever.  Moms no longer need fear that the very act of bringing forth life will ultimately cause their own deaths and, therefore, can happily bond with their babies instead.

[1]

The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis, Sherwin B Nuland, WW Norton, 2004

[2]

Oliver Wendell Homes: The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever

 {Main photo credit: Copyright Meg McGath, used with permission.} 

{ Jane Seymour photo credit: Queen Jane Seymour, courtesy of Wikimedia. By Hans Holbein - egE1bExAbnBDgg at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22189674 } 

{ Elizabeth of York photo credit: By Elizabeth_and_Henry.jpg: Malden, Sarah, Countess of Essex (c. 1761-1838)[1][2] derivative work: Jappalang (Elizabeth_and_Henry.jpg) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6859938 }

{Katherine Parr photo credit: After Master John, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Queen_Catherine_Parr.jpg}