Hans Sloane

Hans Sloane (1660-1753), prominent British physician, scientist, and collector whose extensive collection of plants, animals, antiquities, books, coins, and other curiosities formed the basis of the British Museum and later the Natural History Museum.

Sloane was born in Killyleagh, Ireland, where as a child he took a keen interest in natural history. In 1679 he moved to London to study chemistry and botany, and expanded his studies to include anatomy and medicine during time spent in continental Europe between 1683 and 1685. Returning to London he was made a Fellow of the recently established, but nonetheless highly regarded, Royal Society, before travelling in 1687 to Jamaica as physician to the new governor there.

The journey and time spent in the Caribbean were fruitful as Sloane closely observed the world around him, meticulously noting the appearance and habits of flora and fauna, local customs, and natural phenomena such as earthquakes. On his return to England in 1689 he compiled a list of the plants that he had collected, which was published in 1696 as the Catalogus Plantarum. The first volume of his work, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles, &c. Of the last of those Islands, was published in 1707, and contained careful details not only of his observations of the plants and animals, but also how the local inhabitants had used these natural resources (see Ethnobotany). The second volume appeared in 1725. His own works as well as his collections have proved useful resources for scientific researchers from contemporaries such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, and Carolus Linnaeus, through to the present day.

Sloane had a successful medical career and counted among his wealthy and aristocratic clients Queen Anne (he was appointed Physician Extraordinary, 1696), George I (1716), and George II (Physician in Ordinary, 1727). In 1719 he became the president of the College of Physicians. Not interested in simply offering cures to patients, he was an advocate and supporter of innovative schemes such as inoculation against smallpox and the use of quinine, and devised a beverage in which roasted cocoa beans and milk were heated together, the forerunner of Cadbury’s hot chocolate drink, which at that time was believed to promote good health. He also backed the Chelsea Physic Garden, granting land to the Society of Apothecaries in perpetuity for the cultivation of medicinal plants.

Sloane continued with his collecting, acquiring the important collection of William Charlton (Courten) as well as those of Mark Catesby, James Petiver, and Leonard Plukenet, among others. He became president of the Royal Society in 1727 in the same year he was knighted. The expansion of his collection dictated that he buy a second townhouse in Bloomsbury, London, to accommodate all the items he had acquired, before he finally moved to a manor house in Chelsea in 1742. On his death he bequeathed the collection to the nation in return for £20,000. The bequest went on to form the basis of the British Museum, which opened in 1759.