What is Milk Fever?

[Nick29]

They probably aren't the same thing, but (as at least one other poster has said) milk fever is rarely fatal, so if a death certificate says that a woman has died from milk fever, it has probably been mis-diagnosed.

[ricky1]

They probably aren't the same thing, but (as at least one other poster has said) milk fever is rarely fatal, so if a death certificate says that a woman has died from milk fever, it has probably been mis-diagnosed.

Dont forget we are talking about over 100 years ago. This day and age it might be called something else .

ricky

[Arranroots]

Any kind of infection may potentially be fatal.   

We are talking about the days before antibiotics when you could die from even minor cuts and grazes.

Infection in the breast, or the womb or the finger could all lead to major infection and death.

We are so incredibly lucky these days that we don't have to worry about these things.

Apart from those antibiotic-resistant infections which we hear so much about - but that's another topic ...

[Nick29]

I'm sorry, I don't want to appear argumentative,  but puerperal fever is a "simple infection" that was killing women 100 years ago, and unfortunately it still is, in fairly significant numbers.  If the symptoms are not spotted early enough, it can (and does) kill young and physically fit women.  The failure is in the diagnosis, not the treatment, and once sepsis has set in, antibiotics cannot always save the mother's life.

Sufficient people thought it to be a significant problem in 2007 to start an electronic petition to the Prime Minister, and although 3895 people signed the petition, the government didn't think it important enough to do anything about.  Although puerperal fever still accounts for 12% of all post-birth maternal deaths, the government thought that the overall maternal death rate was low enough not to worry about it.

My father's life was ruined when his mother died of this disease at 34, when he was 6 years old, and despite huge medical advances, it is still leaving children without mothers today, and with a little more public awareness, this could be eliminated. 

[pjbuk007]

Arranroots and others, I cannot find the reference, but Milk Fever WAS used to refer to what is truly puerperal sepsis, certainly in the 19th century and previously.  I worked on maternal mortality, including the history of it, for WHO and as a research project many years ago, and also have been reading a great deal on women's health & social problems in history more recently.  As I understand it,  Milk Fever was used for fevers occurring in the early phase of lactation, when the milk was coming in.  It was not necessarily causally related to lactation, but happened at the same time, as puerperal sepsis does.

So I am sure that the woman in question COULD have died from an overwhelming infection secondary to mastitis, but it is also possible that she died from puerperal sepsis, and in my view that is more likely. 

As Nick29 says, this is a significant and tragic cause of mortality in mothers to this day, and occurs even more frequently in the developing world. 

[JAP]

Hi pjbuk007,

Thanks for your very sensible and well-informed contributions.

My immediate reaction to this thread was 'puerperal fever' as everything I'd read heretofore told me that 'milk fever' on death certs normally meant 'puerperal fever' (pelvic infections) - and almost invariably did not mean mastitis nor any other sort of fever/infection.

I didn't bother posting earlier but here's a link which may be of interest to this thread:
http://www.rootschat.com/links/03jy/

JAP
PS: Arranroots, Mastitis eh!  Speaking from personal experience I can only say that it was incredibly painful 

[Viktoria]

Milk fever is the common name for puerperal fever which is a massive infection caused by poor hygiene on the part of whoever cared for a newly delivered mother.It was very common at one time in the days before asepsis was carried out ie prevention of infection by hand scrubbing ,rubber gloves and clean sterilised linen. It was very prevalent in hospitals in the 1800`s when the doctors had so little regard for hygiene and no respect for women that they did the ward rounds of the maternity patients AFTER they had done dissections in the mortuary!!!I t was called milk fever because the onset came at roughly the same time as a new mother started to lactate and it was thought to be caused by the production of the breast milk but in hospitals the doctors brought the infection to women on their hands and clothes which they did not wash or change from the post mortems they carried out.You can imagine how dangerous that was-to make an internal examination with filthy hands. Instruments like forceps were not sterilised either. midwifery was a very neglected branch of medicine  mostly carried out by unqualified women because doctors did not think it worth their attention. In the very poor conditions at the time by way of houses with no running water and certainly no hot water supply it is understandable that conditions were condusive to such infections,most births were at home  after all but through genuine lack of understanding of basic hygiene thosands of women died each year from `"milk fever" and the very poor who were badly nourished had no strength to resist it. hope this has proved helpful.

[pjbuk007]

Yes, and there is a good explanation which confirms what I and others said on pages 105, 106 and onwards of JAP's excellent link.

[pennine]

I always thought 'Child bed fever' is what we know today as eclampsia, whereby the mother begins to have fits due to toxins in the blood. If the child isn't delivered pronto both mother and child die. In some cases the child was delivered safely by ceasarian but the mother alas didn't survive.

Pennine