Puerperal Fever

Puerperal Fever

91x91cm (35x35")

This work presents an allegory of childbirth in the context of puerperal fever, a disease that killed thousands of women in 19th-century maternity wards.

For decades, the cause remained misunderstood. Physicians moved directly from autopsies to delivery rooms without washing their hands, unknowingly carrying infectious material to the women they treated. In the 1840s, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis observed that simple handwashing drastically reduced maternal deaths. His discovery was largely rejected by the medical establishment of his time.

The composition: The central figure is a woman in labor. She lies on a bed whose headboard forms a cross. It resembles less a hospital bed than a tombstone. Because childbirth becomes indistinguishable from burial. Beside her stands the physician who assists the delivery. But his figure shifts. Half doctor, half reaper. The instrument meant to deliver life becomes the gesture that brings death. The ambiguity reflects the historical reality of the time.

The people entrusted with saving women were also, unknowingly, the ones transmitting the disease. The physician's dual form is not an accusation against an individual. It represents a system of knowledge that failed to recognize its own role in the tragedy.

Between 10 and 30 percent of women in some maternity wards died from puerperal fever. Hospitals, meant to protect life, became places of contagion.

The title Puerperal Fever refers not only to a medical condition but to a historical blindness — a moment when authority resisted evidence while women continued to die.

Material and FormThe surface uses a restrained palette of pale creams, muted greys, dusty browns and cold off-whites. The overall finish is matte, textured, and deliberately subdued.

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