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game of thrones - Did Mirri Maz Duur deliberately mistreat Drogo's wound?


When Khal Drogo gets wounded by Mago, the Lhazareen healer Mirri Maz Duur offers to help treat the wound to prevent an infection.



But Drogo dies from the infection anyways. Seeing how she felt towards the Dothraki for destroying her sacred temple and raping her, did she deliberately mistreat the infection so Drogo would die?



What do the books say about this?



Answer




I was thinking about this question when my daughter woke up at 3:30 this morning and I was trying to get her back to sleep. So I've been doing some digging around. I don't think that Mirri Maz Duur intentionally mistreated Drogo in an attempt to kill him.


If you re-read the section where she initially treats him, she boils wine and pours it over the wound. We have seen other maesters do the same thing in treating wounds (Pycelle does this when he attempts to treat Robert Baratheon's boar wound). Additionally, we know that alcohol and heat both have antiseptic properties. She stitches his wound closed with a silk thread. She covers it with lambskin which doesn't personally seem the cleanest method of covering a wound to me, but it serves the same purpose as cotton (which I'm sure they didn't have), and some cultures have been known to use peat as an equivalent to cotton for wound dressings (which actually works better than cotton because it can absorb more than cotton, but it's not as pretty). Then she instructs Drogo to avoid milk of the poppy (which I can only assume to be opium or an opium-like substance if we assume that plants in that world are roughly the same as plants in this world), and alcohol. I don't exactly get why he should avoid a pain-killer, but research shows that alcohol consumption slows wound healing and increases the likelihood of infection (reasonable since we know that alcohol is a bloodthinner). So everything she has done and said up to this point indicate that she is truly trying to heal him.


This leaves only the question of the poultice that she put on him. After he falls from his horse, she informs Dany that the poultice was made of firepod and sting-me-not. I haven't run across any plants that are actually called this, so this is completely conjecture. The poultice could have been the cause of Drogo's problems, but I'm guessing that a firepod is a chile pepper of some kind (and it would makes sense to call it "firepod" if it happens to be a red or orange pepper). Capsaicin has antiseptic properties and would probably burn like hell if applied to a wound. Sting-me-not sounds like a plant in the Urtica genus (stinging nettles and related) which also have antiseptic properties.


So...really, it seems like Drogo's death is caused by Drogo. He removes the poultice and lambskin six days before he falls from his horse because he says it burns, and has it replaced with the soothing mud poultice placed there by the herbwomen--not by Mirri Maz Duur. I don't know about you, but putting mud on a partially open wound is just nasty. Mud is full of bacteria and other microorganisms. It is not going to help the healing process. He was also drinking fermented mare's milk (alcohol!) and had been taking milk of the poppy. This probably dulled his senses and made him unaware of his declining health until it got to the point where he was too sick to know or care. Basically everything MMD said NOT to do, he did.


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