ABSTRACT
The maternity facilities of Vienna's General Hospital were located in the seventh courtyard on the east side of the institution. Hospitals like Vienna's were intended to provide safe and humane facilities in which indigent women could give birth and, in many respects, were indeed a great improvement over earlier institutions. From 1798 until 1822, Johann Lukas Boer directed the Viennese maternity clinic. In the clinics, women were especially vulnerable to a particularly horrible disease known as "childbed fever" or "puerperal fever". While Boer supervised the obstetrical clinic in Vienna, the mortality rate for childbed fever averaged about 1 percent—a very favorable rate. In 1773 a prominent British obstetrician observed that childbed fever could be caused when the "tightness of stays and petticoat bindings, and the weight of the pockets and of the petticoats" press the intestines and block excretion thereby forcing the body to reabsorb its own wastes. Therapy for childbed fever usually involved bloodletting.
