History
INFECTIOUS SHERBORNE… SO WHAT’S NEW? Cindy Chant, Blue Badge Guide
O
ften in history when there was a plague, an earthquake, flood or epidemic, people would take that as a sign that the human race must mend its ways. And now, alone in my garden, I sit and ponder, because for many weeks I had been intending to write an article on Sherborne’s nineteenth-century transformation from a filthy and disease-ridden town, to a town with clean water and good health. As humans have spread across the world, so infectious diseases been a constant companion. Outbreaks still occur, even in these modern times, although not every outbreak reaches pandemic levels as COVID-19 has done. 54 | Sherborne Times | February 2021
In common with many Dorset towns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sherborne public hygiene was just appalling – the worst of all Dorset towns, some suggested. Certainly the death rate from ‘the fever’ – typhoid and cholera – in the years 1820 to 1870 was very high. The death rate in 1840 was 30.8 per thousand and by 1860 it had risen to a horrendous 67.4 per thousand. This meant that almost 400 Sherborne people died each year. In 1859 the Digby Estate reported that work on the harvest was seriously restricted, as 41 workers had died and of the remaining others, half were too ill to attend for work. And these deaths did not only occur amongst
