Today in 1537 Queen Jane Seymour died after giving birth to her son Edward. Her pregnancy had been easy but she had a difficult labor.
It took three nights and two days to deliver him on October 12. She seemed to recover and was sitting up in bed receiving visitors after his christening. She even signed the birth announcements but she quickly took a turn for the worst on October 17.
Midwives theorized that her uterus would have been exhausted after all of that pushing of Edward who was likely not positioned well in the womb. That meant that she would have not expelled the placenta which would have eventually become infected. Having lost a lot of blood and being exhausted, her body would have been less able to fight the infection. Likely, there were also dirty hands making things worse.
In modern times, the doctor would perform a C-section or use forceps after such a long and difficult labour saving the mother’s life, but women still died in childbirth at an alarming rate. The World Health Organization estimates that over 1,500 women died from childbirth every day.
That’s your Tudor Minute for today and remember you can dive deeper into life in 16th-century England through the Renaissance English history podcast at Englandcast.com.
Suggested links:
Episode 105: Historian Alison Weir on Jane Seymour
Autumn 2017 Tudor Summit: Janet Wertman on the Seymours
From the shop:
Jane Seymour Tudor Women Charm Necklace
Ps. All products are made on-demand and can take a few weeks to ship.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop. She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.