childbed

“The childbed is our battlefield,” the late Queen Aemma noted in the premiere, and “Dragon” remains determined to show as well as tell us this fact.

At the top of the episode, an uncomfortably pregnant Queen Aemma foreshadows her fate: “The childbed is our battlefield,” she tells her daughter, Princess Rhaenyra.

“The childbed is our battlefield,” she said, and we saw how that turned out.

This is what happened in the women's hospitals of the 19th century, when doctors spread puerperal or "childbed" fever from one postpartum woman to another.

Once handwashing protocols were implemented in the Austrian hospital, the rates of women dying from childbed fever plummeted.