Matt Kaplan

You know how if you're... You got to hand back that book at the library.

No, you're kidding.

But you're out of hours.

So you got that drop box at the library where you can put the book and they'll sort it the next day and you don't have to pay the late fees.

They had a kid drop box?

They had kid drop boxes.

Well, I think it was the size of the Dropbox that really mattered.

So it depends.

How large are your children?

So Maria Theresa really cared about all of these women in her empire who were having babies and were desperately poor.

So she ordered the construction of a hospital in Vienna that was unheard of in terms of its size.

Absolutely enormous.

And it was built to look after the urban poor, which is an incredible thing.

But there were major issues, and this was known as preparal fever or childbed fever.

And back in the day, upwards of 20% of the women in the hospital in Vienna would contract this disease permanently.

And if you got it, you died.

We're talking about one in five women after delivering their baby would develop these swollen blue and black splotches around their abdomen and their thighs, and they would develop horrendous fevers.

They'd become delirious.

And I mean, it was so bad that within two to three days of developing the infection, even the gentle sheets on their bed laying across their abdomen was too much for them to bear.

And they would die in frozen, speechless terror from the pain about five days after childbirth.