SLOANE, Sir Hans (1660-1753), a celebrated collector and successful physician, was born on 16th April 1660 at Killileagh in county Down, Ireland, where his father had settled at the head of a Scotch colony sent over by James I. He had as a youth a strong turn for collecting objects of natural history and other curiosities. This led him to the study of medicine, which he went to London to pursue, directing his attention assiduously to botany, materia medica, and pharmacy. His collecting propensities made him useful to the more philosophically minded Ray and Boyle, and procured him their patronage. After four years in London he travelled through France, spending some time at Paris and Montpellier, and taking his M.D. degree at the university of Orange. He returned to London with a considerable collection of plants and other curiosities, of which the former were sent to Ray and utilized by him for his History of Plants. Sloane was quickly elected into the Royal Society, and at the same time he had the good fortune to attract the notice of Sydenham, who took a fancy to him and gave him valuable introductions to practice. In 1687 he became fellow of the College of Physicians, and took the opportunity of proceeding to Jamaica the same year as physician in the suite of the duke of Albemarle. The duke died soon after landing, and Sloane’s visit lasted only fifteen months; but during that time he got together about 800 new species of plants, the island being at the time virgin ground to the botanist. Of these he published an elaborate catalogue in Latin; and at a later date (1707-25) he made the experiences of his visit the subject of two sumptuous folio volumes. His merits as a collector were sufficient to give him a high place in the scientific circles of the time. He became ...secretary to the Royal Society in 1693, and edited its Transactions for twenty years. His practice as a physician among the upper classes was large and lucrative; he is said to have inspired the members of the court and aristocracy with the “greatest confidence in his prescriptions.” In the pamphlets written concerning Dr Cockburn’s sale of a secret remedy for dysentery and other fluxes, it was stated for the defence that Sloane himself did not disdain the same kind of professional conduct; and there is some colour given to that charge by the fact that his only medical piece, an Account of a Medicine for Soreness, Weakness, and other Distempers of the Eyes (London, 1745) was not given to the world until its author was in his eighty-fifth year, and had retired from practice.
On the accession of George I. Sloane was made physician-general to the army, and in 1716 was created a baronet, being the first medical practitioner to receive an hereditary title. In 1719 he became president of the College of Physicians, and held the office sixteen years. In 1727 he succeeded Sir Isaac Newton in the presidential chair of the Royal Society; he retired from it at the age of eighty, “much against the inclination of that respectable body, who chose Martin Folkes to succeed him, and in a public assembly thanked him for the great and eminent services which he had rendered them.” Sloane’s memory survives more by his judicious investments than by anything that he contributed to the subject-matter of natural science or even of his own profession; his name is absolutely unknown in the history of medicine, and his services to botany were such as, in the nature of things, would be soon forgotten. But his purchase of the manor of Chelsea has perpetuated his memory in the name of a “place,” a street, and a square. His great stroke as a collector was to acquire (by bequest, conditional on paying off certain debts) in 1701 the cabinet of William Courten, who had made collecting the business of his life. When Sloane retired from active work in 1741 his library and cabinet of curiosities, which he took with him from Bloomsbury to his house in Chelsea, had grown to be very extensive and of unique value. On his death on 11th January 1753 he bequeathed his books, manuscripts, prints, drawings, pictures, medals, coins, seals, cameos, and other curiosities to the nation, on condition that parliament should pay to his executors <£20,000, which was a good deal less than the value of the collection. The bequest was accepted on those terms by an Act passed the same year, and the collection, together with George II.’s royal library, &c., was opened to the public at Bloomsbury as the British Museum in 1759. Among his other acts of benevolence or munificence may be mentioned his gift to the Apothecaries’ Company of the freehold of the botanical or physic garden, which they had rented from the Chelsea estate since 1673, also his help in starting the foundling hospital. Sloane is described as having been a man of considerable presence and of courtly address.
See Weld, History of the Royal Society, i. 450 (London, 1848); and Munk, Roll of the College of Physicians, 2d ed., i. 466 (London, 1878).
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