I think childbed fever was some sort of bacteria infection that I think typically developed due to failure to deliver the placenta at all or completely.  It was also called puerperal fever.  Even though the placenta should deliver normally after labor and delivery, sometimes it didn't or a piece of it could be left behind in the uterus.  

It still happens today.  A girl I've known for years who little girl was literally born the day before my son had this problem and had to have some sort of emergency surgery to correct it as it wasn't caught until she returned to her ob/gyn for her 6-week check-up (that was 2008).  My MIL was hospitalized after my SIL was born because of it (this was in 1982).  And (this might be TMI for some people…fair warning) after I had my daughter, I randomly stopped contracting and my doctor had to deliver my placenta manually (you really don't want to know what that entails) and then I had to take some serious high-powered antibiotics to prevent infection (2010). 

Anyanka said:

It wasn't until the middle of the 19th century that doctors started to treat wounds anti-septically. Even them, some surgeons reused to wash their hands or instruments before operating helping to spread bacteria and viruses from patient to patient.

 

Old wives' remedies like mouldy bread on a wound presaged anti-boitics. But were not always succcessful.

 

I had a retained placenta with DD1. I was rushed to surgery due to heamorraging but since I'd been awake for 2 days, I slept though the manual extraction.

Unless the mold on the bread happened to be penicillin! ;-D  Which would have totally been a long-shot!  

The story of Ignaz Semmelweis is very interesting as he is credited for having greatly reduced the number of maternal deaths due to childbed fever.  He worked in the Vienna General Hospital's Obstetrics Clinic which had two wards–one ward was for training physicians and the other ward was used for training midwives.  Women were randomly assigned to a ward as they came into the hospital–probably based on wherever a bed was available.  The midwife ward had a mortality rate of, like, 3% whereas the physician's ward had a mortality rate of close to 16% at one point (and the midwife ward was always more crowded).  Apparently, the physicians ward had a reputation that was so poor that women BEGGED to be admitted to the midwife ward instead. He finally realized that the women were being contaminated by the doctors/students who would perform autopsies on the women who had died the previous day in the mornings and then proceed to deliver babies in the afternoon and evenings without washing their hands first!!  Thus, they were exposing these poor women to all these bacteria!  Midwives, however, did not perform dissections.  Semmelweis ordered all medical students to wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution and mortality rates dropped to roughly 3% in the medical student ward.  Since Germ Theory had not been developed yet, Simmelweis knew nothing of bacteria so he proposed that physicians were exposing women to “cadaverous particles” and he chose the chlorinated lime solution because he noticed that it worked best to eliminate the smell of cadaver from the hands.

Unfortunately, others were reluctant to adopt Simmelweis's techniques so his work went ignored and panned until Pasteur developed the Germ Theory.  Sadly, Simmelweis either had a nervous breakdown or possibly Alzheimer's and died in an asylum in 1865 (I think) of, ironically, septicemia. 

BoleynBlue said:

My own Great grandmother died giving birth to my Grandfather, I am not sure if this was due to childbed fever though or a different type of complication.

My great-great grandmother died within a week of giving birth to my great grandfather, ironically on her 1 year wedding anniversary. GG Grandpa Webb didn't know what to do with a newborn (roughly 1910 – how times have changed!), so the baby was raised by his sister, Belle. Dad said they lived within a ½ mile of each other, and his grandpa literally ran back and forth between the houses daily. He knew who his dad was, but he considered his Aunt Belle his mother, so stayed with her. (I'd asked my Dad why Webb didn't take his son back when he remarried. Dad said his grandpa was 2 by then, and all concerned thought it would have been cruel to take him away from the only mother he knew.)

As I read these sad stories of maternal death, I am reminded of the vicarious nature of life, and my own existence. I am an avid amateur genealogist whose research my own family tree extensivley. If one ancestor died in childbirth, for example, the course of my own existence might never have happened.

It is still horrible that women die in post-natal care today, and not just in the Third World. In the supposedly developed Core and Perpheral countries have high rates of maternal and infant death. That is one aspect of childbirth that scares me.

I am not sure if it's the same where you are all from, but on Prince Edward Island there is a disproportionally high number of women having c-sections. I know some women need them to avoid complications and fetal/mother death. But this was not the case with women I know.

I am always saddened when I think of the horrible death of Jane Seymour. She may not be my favourite person, but the slow, agonizing death is not something any women deserved.