November 11, 2024 • 36 mins
Sir Hans Sloane’s legacy is a bit mixed. He is the reason there’s a British Museum, but there are a lot of problematic aspects to the way he gathered his collection.
Research:
- Blair, Molly. “350 years of the Chelsea Physic Garden: A brief history.” Gardens Illustrated. https://www.gardensillustrated.com/features/chelsea-physic-garden-350
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Sir Hans Sloane, Baronet". Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 Apr. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sir-Hans-Sloane-Baronet
- Delbourgo, James. “Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum.” Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2017.
- “Health in the 17th Royal Museums Greenwich. https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/health-17th-century
- “Introducing Sir Hans Sloane.” The Sloane Letters Project. https://sloaneletters.com/about-sir-hans-sloane/
- Lemonius, Michele. “‘Deviously Ingenious’: British Colonialism in Jamaica.” Peace Research, vol. 49, no. 2, 2017, pp. 79–103. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44779908
- “London, January 13.” The Derby Mercury. Jan. 12, 1753. https://www.newspapers.com/image/394230860/?match=1&terms=Sir%20Hans%20Sloane
- Pavid, Katie. “Hans Sloane: Physician, collector and botanist.” National History Museum. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/hans-sloane-physician-collector-botanist.html
- “Sir Hans Sloane.” Sir Hans Sloane Centre. https://sirhanssloanecentre.co.uk/who-is-hans-sloane/
- “Sir Hans Sloane.” The British Museum. https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/sir-hans-sloane
- Stearns, Raymond Phinneas. “James Petiver Promoter of Natural Science, c.1663-1718.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. October 1952. https://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44807240.pdf
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I was in London
a few weeks ago and I finally went to the
British Museum, Yeah, which I loved. There's a cool thing
(00:24):
there that I didn't realize in its layout, which is
that the early areas of the museum that you passed
through are really fascinating because they're set up almost as
though you're walking through a grand personal study where someone's
personal collection is housed. And that's because you kind of
are what sets it off. And what confused me initially
(00:48):
is that there aren't a lot of like placards and
shelf talkers telling you what you're looking at. You can
find that information if you look for it. And then
you come across the bar of Sir Hans Sloan, and
there's lots of signage about him and his legacy, and
that's because most of the things you're looking at are
things he collected in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or
(01:10):
replicas of those things. Like it's kind of purposely made
to look like here is his personal collection, and then
there's more. Once you get in through that into the
museum proper, you get to see all the cool stuff
like the Rosetta Stone and whatnot. But we don't get
a whole lot of Hans Sloan education in the US.
(01:31):
I didn't that I can recall. I don't think i'd
ever heard his name before. Honestly, I knew about him,
but only because of reading that I have done as
an adult, like connected to this podcast. So I decided
he would be an interesting topic. His legacy, as acknowledged
by the British Museum is mixed. He is the reason
there's a British Museum, but there are a lot of
(01:52):
problematic aspects to the way that he gathered his collection
and really like the resources that enabled him to do so.
So we're going to talk about him today. Yeah, I
think there are also some problematic aspects to the British
Museum more broadly, but that's like way beyond the scope
of today. Oh, for sure, We've talked about it multiple times, right,
(02:13):
Like our whole episodes on the Elgin Marbles discuss all
of those problems at length. Yeah, there are multiple issues, Yeah,
but they're pretty forthright about his problems, I will say so.
Hans Sloan was born on April sixteenth, sixteen sixty in Killiele, Ulster, County,
(02:35):
Down Ireland that sits on the east coast of what's
now Northern Ireland, southeast of Belfast. He happened to be
born the same year the Royal Society was founded, and
that would become an important part of his life. The
Sloane family was not wealthy, but they were in a
unique position. Hans's parents, Alexander Sloan and Sarah Hicks Sloane,
(02:59):
had each moved to Killyle from Scotland as servants of
the wealthy Protestants who had moved there as part of
the plantation of Ulster. We also talked about the plantation
of Ulster recently. Alexander and Sarah had met in Ulster
and gotten married, and Hans was their seventh and last child,
(03:19):
but one of only three who survived childhood. His surviving
older brothers, James and William, became a lawyer and a merchant.
Because this Loans were part of a colony that was
established on seized land, there was a degree of privilege,
even for those who were working in service to the
aristocracy that had been granted that land. Biographer James del
(03:43):
Borgo notes in his book Collecting the World quote he
likely enjoyed highly cordial, if not familial, relations with the
aristocratic Hamiltons, whose company appears to have lent him an
easy sociability around persons of different rank, which was later
to be one of the hallmarks of his own extensive
social circles. From an early age, plants fascinated Hans, and
(04:08):
he also loved exploring and learning about nature in general.
He is said to have wandered all over that land
that di Hamilton's had been granted. He wrote as an
adult that he was quote very much pleased with the
study of plants and other parts of nature, and that
he had observed nature out in the fields in his childhood,
as well as when visiting other people who had collected
(04:31):
various natural items. He also described, for example, watching pete
be dug up to be used as fuel and being
very intrigued by all of the root systems that were
revealed when that pete was pulled up from the earth,
and he also noticed that animal skeletons and sometimes even
pieces of gold were entangled in the roots. He to
(04:52):
Tracy's Dismay was a fan of the coin Horde. He
started his own little collections as a kis with plants
and things like seagull eggs that he found around home.
As a teenager, Sloane went through some sort of horrible
illness described as a violent hemorrhage. This illness stopped his
(05:13):
life in its tracks for several years, from the ages
of sixteen until nineteen. He rarely left his room, and
he had very frequent bouts of coughing, in which he
would spit up blood. Sloane would occasionally have this problem
crop up throughout his life. He lived longer than average,
though This early experience made him take his health really
(05:37):
seriously and he was extremely cautious regarding his diet. He
drank very little. This may have also informed his decision
to study medicine. Yeah, when we say he drank very little,
we mean alcohol. He was big on hydration, as you'll
hear in a little while. When it came time for
higher education, Sloane studied medicine, first in London and then
(05:57):
in France. And of course this is a time when
the path to a medical degree was quite different than
it would be today. While in London, he kind of
went the root of an apothecary and he learned how
to prepare plants for medicinal purposes from a chemist who
had moved to the city from Germany named Nikolaus Staphorst.
This was in addition to a number of other things
that Sloane did as a little bit of a sort
(06:20):
of self directed study. He often visited the physic Garden
in Chelsea to study plants and to learn to tell
them apart on site, and he also made an effort
to just connect with like minded people who could help
him along in his learning and teach him what they knew. Next,
Sloane went to France, where he attended the University of
Orange and graduated with his medical degree from there in
(06:43):
sixteen eighty three. He had read the work of a
number of notable French scientists and physicians before he went there,
and he was able to reach out to some of
those authors to further extend his network of colleagues and mentors.
One of the men he befriended was botanist Joseph Pitton
div Turnfort, who is now recognized for laying the foundation
(07:06):
of plant classification. That idea of classification of plants and
animals that had not already been identified was something that
tourn four was really driven by, and it no doubt
influenced Sloane in his own collecting of specimens when he
had the opportunity to travel a few years later. Yeah,
there was a whole ideology of like, we could lose
(07:28):
any of this at any time, we need to collect
and catalog all of it so we know what we
have on earth. And that was a lot of what
Sloane bought into. So after getting his medical degree, Sloane
spent another two years in France before he moved back
to London, and though he was still fairly young, he
was just twenty five at the time. He was elected
(07:48):
to the Royal Society as a fellow in sixteen eighty five,
and his next step was to actually practice medicine, which
he did under the mentorship of Thomas Sydenham. In sixteen
eighty nine, opened up his own medical practice out of
his home in London. Uh that was not uncommon for
doctors at the time. They often worked out of their houses.
(08:09):
When Hans was twenty seven, two important things happened. First,
he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.
That's something that comes up pretty frequently on the show,
but we don't usually note what a true distinction that was.
At the time, there were only a couple dozen men
who had been given that distinction, So this was a
very small select group. Yeah, I think I read a
(08:33):
stat and don't quote me that by the mid eighteen
hundreds it was still like less than fifty people. It
was not something that everybody just got by virtue of practicing. Second,
he was offered the chance to go to Jamaica as
a personal doctor to the island's new British governor, Christopher Munk,
(08:53):
second Duke of Albemarle. Sloan and Monk had actually met
before Sloan had gotten his medical credentials in so they
did have a degree of familiarity with one another. This
was really a dangerous job offer. The travel to get
there alone was likely to encounter any number of problems,
and this was smack dab in the middle of what's
(09:15):
known as the Golden Age of piracy, with the Caribbean
known as an especially active place in that regard. Several
of Hans Sloan's friends tried to persuade him to turn
down the appointment, but he managed to get a lot
of money and a lot of authority as part of
the deal, and so he took it. He was to
be paid six hundred pounds a year, plus another three
(09:37):
hundred pounds up front as sort of a signing bonus,
and he was not only in charge of Monk's healthcare,
but of the entire fleet, and then when he got there,
of basically everyone and everything that lived on the grounds.
So that meant that he also was getting a management
position as he helmed the team of physicians and apothecaries
that would be there as well as on the journey.
(09:59):
The trip with Monk was destined to be the beginning
of an impressive lifelong collection for Sloan, but that wasn't
something that was born solely of his own desires. When
he left London to cross the Atlantic, he carried with
him requests to collect samples from a number of his
colleagues in the medical field, some of them had been
the ones to urge him not to go. During this
(10:22):
time at sea, he made notes regarding his observations of
the things he could see in the ocean, referencing dolphins, jellyfish, birds,
and phosphorescence, among other things. Yeah, I love that His
friends were like, don't go, don't go, don't go. Well,
if you're going anyway, here's my wish list as why
as you're there. Coming up, we're going to talk about
(10:42):
Sloan's time in Jamaica, but first we will pause for
a sponsor break. After the three month long voyage it
took to get to Jamaica, Sloan was away from London
for another fifteen months. He didn't only go to Jamaica.
(11:05):
He also visited Barbados, Saint Kitts, and Nevis, and he
made additional stops throughout the Caribbean. And he collected specimens
on all of his travels, hundreds of them. Some accounts
put the number around eight hundred, but some note that
as exclusively the number of plant samples he acquired, and
he did also collect various fauna. This was by no
(11:28):
means the entirety of the collection he would eventually have,
and we will talk more about that in just a bit.
Floane's impression of life in Jamaica was a little bit odd.
He thought, for example, that the meat of the turtles
there was causing a blood infection in the people who
ate it. He noted that people sweated heavily. Medicine in
(11:49):
the seventeenth century was still grappling with a lot of
the concepts that are pretty well understood today. By the
time Sloane was in Jamaica, For example, scientists had understood
that blood flowed through the body thanks to the pumping
of the heart for about fifty years. They understood that
humans and most animals require oxygen to breathe. That was
(12:12):
a concept less than thirty years old, and there were
still plenty of physicians who believed in diagnosing patients based
on Galen's system of the four humors. Clone was really
ahead of the game and a lot of ways when
it came to medical ideology. Though one of the things
he advocated for was that everyone drink more water and
less alcohol. Doesn't seem as though that was a well
(12:35):
accepted piece of advice. The popular belief at the time
was that you needed to drink alcohol to digest food
better in hot climates. That one really kind of flummockses
to me, because I love a cocktail, but drinking alcohol
when it's really hot out is kind of nightmarish to me,
So I'm like, why, why it does seem likely that
(13:00):
Sloane would have stayed in the Caribbean for much longer
had it not been for the fact that his employer died.
According to the History of Parliament that is online, Monk
liked Jamaica, but it didn't really like him back quote.
His principal achievement was the recovery of a wrecked Spanish
treasure ship, the first successful salvage operation of modern times,
(13:21):
which brought him and estimated forty eight thousand pounds for
an investment of eight hundred pounds. But he did not
enjoy his wealth for long. Drink and the climate finished
him off on six October sixteen eighty eight. Monk was
really young when he died, just thirty five, and there
isn't a whole lot of information about his death and
(13:42):
what sorts of attention Sloan may have given him as
his doctor. In Sloane's own words, Sloane made some notes
about Monk's health, noting that he didn't seem entirely healthy
even before the trip started. We also know that he
bled Monk as a treatment on occasion, and he gave
him medicine for jaundice. Monk had a history of heavy drinking,
(14:03):
and it seemed that he continued to do so in
Jamaica despite all advice against it from Sloane as well
as other physicians. And it is from those other physicians
that we actually have the information that we do about
Monk's case. Sloan left it out of his published accounts,
perhaps out of respect or gauging by the accounts that
do exist, because it sounds like a truly awful end
(14:26):
that maybe Sloane did not think would be appropriate for
all readers. Even post mortem. The body of the Duke
proved to be a challenging case for Sloane. It fell
to him to figure out how to preserve his employer's
remains for transit across the Atlantic when he had died
in a climate where the locals insisted that you had
to bury a body within twelve hours. The idea was
(14:50):
the heat accelerated decomposition so much you had to do
it that quickly. After an extensive preparation that involved removing
some organs, filling the box with powder to dry it out,
and wrapping it in linen that had been soaked in
a mix of resin, wax and fat, Monk's body was
sealed into a coffin covered with pitch and shipped back
(15:10):
to England for burial. At that time, Sloane's time in
the Caribbean came to a close, and during that time
in the Caribbean, all of monks and Sloans and other
people's activities on Jamaica were of course made possible by
enslaved labor. The colonization of Jamaica goes all the way
back to Columbus, when he claimed the island for Spain,
(15:32):
even though there were people there already. In the early
fifteen hundred, Spain built a settlement on Jamaica and enslaved
the indigenous population of the island, the Arawaks. They sometimes
go by other names as well. In addition to being
worked to death, many Arawoks died as a result of
exposure to diseases that were brought by the Spanish, and
the high death rate of that indigenous population led the
(15:55):
Spanish to start bringing in enslaved people from Africa to
the island to fill those losses of the enslaved workforce.
In sixteen fifty five, Britain battled Spain over possession of
Jamaica and one and in sixteen seventy Britain formally took
possession of the island. From there, the slave trade that
went through Jamaica ramped up considerably. This is a very
(16:19):
simplified and quick overview of how we get to the
point where Hans Sloane was there. We have an episode,
for example, on the Maroon Wars in the archive from
twenty seventeen that covers two uprisings of the enslaved people
of the island against the British colonists who ruled there.
There is a lot more history and nuance to all
of that, but we just want to make clear what
(16:40):
was going on. Additionally, Sloane was actively involved in behaviors
as a doctor that exploited the black enslaved workforce, particularly
the women. There are instances in his notes where he
prescribes that patients should drink breast milk from enslaved black women.
He also add that enslaved women should serve as wet
(17:02):
nurses for the families of white colonists. But when it
came to treating illnesses in the black population, which was
something that was absolutely part of his job, Sloane's notes
indicate that he was less likely to believe them when
they described their symptoms than he would his white patients. Overall,
his writing about the non white population is lace throughout
(17:25):
with racism and a sense of superiority. It broke my
heart reading that, because these are problems that persist today
in the medical community of listening to black people and
other people of color when they talk about how they
don't feel well, and it was going on in the
sixteen hundreds as well. But the most Germane part of
(17:49):
this story is that while there is a lot of
discussion about Sloan collecting various flora and fauna on Jamaica,
in most cases those samples were procured for him I
enslaved people from West Africa. According to the British Museum,
most of those people could be traced back to Ghana
and Cotduvoir. And that was not only a matter of
(18:10):
those people gathering samples at the direction of Sloan. These
were people that had a deep understanding and knowledge about
the flora of the island and that heavily informed the
direction of the collection. So as we talk about his
immense collection and others that belonged to various British collectors
that would eventually come into his possession, the work involved
(18:31):
in gathering those materials has to be credited to enslaved people.
There is also another way in which slavery directly benefited
Sloan's collecting that we're going to talk about in just
a moment. One of the more fun sides to the
story of the Jamaica trip, but one that we have
to do some myth busting on, has to do with chocolate.
(18:52):
Sloane is said to have discovered while there a local
beverage made using the cacal plant, but he didn't really
care for it. It upset his stomach and it was
too bitter, so he decided to doctor it up by
making it with milk instead of with water, and that
version he loved. When he got back to London, he
started making it there. Sloane touted the health benefits as
(19:16):
well as the deliciousness of his drink, and soon it
started popping up as an offering at London's apothecaries. And
the story goes that Sloane's cacaw drink got the attention
of a name that will likely be familiar to listeners,
and that is the Cadbury Brothers, and from there it
became a retail sensation. But that story isn't really accurate.
(19:37):
The story is often held up as the tale of
Hanslane inventing milk chocolate or hot chocolate or both, but
it's a bit more complicated than that. Milk chocolate absolutely
already existed. There were even recipes for it available in
England well before Sloane's trip. There were also versions of
(19:59):
hot chocol drinks made with milk and cinnamon in Jamaica
before he got there. It does seem like he encountered
it for the first time when he arrived there, and
he might have even believed that he invented it. He
definitely prescribed chocolate and milky hot chocolate beverages as a
health drink once he was back in London, but he
(20:21):
was also not the only physician to do that, nor
was he the first. This seems more than anything to
be a case where name recognition kind of drives the
bus with this whole narrative, because most people knew his name,
that name was used on commercially produced chocolate products in
England and along the line, there was just a mythology
(20:43):
that developed of his having invented it. Yeah, the Slow
name has persisted into very modern times. As part of
the Chocolate Legacy of England. After returning to London in
sixteen ninety three, slow And became the Secretary of the
Royal Society, and in this role he actually had a
(21:04):
fairly significant impact. He restarted the publication of philosophical transactions
and he expanded its offerings. He also picked back up
with his medical practice. Despite having lost his first very
high profile patient at a pretty early age, Sloan was
in demand among the most powerful and important people in Britain.
(21:26):
He continued to be the personal physician for the Duke
of Albemarle's widow, and he became Physician Extraordinary to Queen Anne.
He actually had quite an impressive collection of patients, which
included names like John Locke, Samuel Peeps and recent frequent
mention on the show Robert Walpole, among others. He was
also employed as a physician at Christ's Hospital, which was
(21:48):
a charity hospital that offered care to London's poor citizens.
On May eleventh, sixteen ninety five, Sloane married a woman
named Elizabeth Langley Rose. Elizabeth was the widow of Folk Rose,
who was one of the doctors who, along with Sloane,
had treated the Duke of Albemarle in Jamaica. Before his death,
(22:10):
in addition to being a doctor, Rose had acquired several
estates and plantations in Jamaica. When Rose died in sixteen
ninety four, those passed to Elizabeth, and through Elizabeth, that
considerable worth passed to Hans Sloane, and that money enabled
him to continue collecting at a rate that would not
have been possible with only his income as a physician.
(22:34):
He received one third of the profits of the Rose plantations.
And this is the second way that slavery enabled his
work that we alluded to earlier. Sloane had enough money
coming in through Elizabeth's Caribbean properties that he was able
to donate the entirety of his salary at the Charity
Hospital back to that organization. He and Elizabeth had three children,
(22:58):
but only two, both of them daughters, survived until adulthood.
Several years after his trip to Jamaica, in sixteen ninety six,
Sloane published a project that he had been working on
since he completed his travels, and that was a catalog
of his plant collection from abroad. The Latin language catalog
was titled Catalogus Plantarum k in Insula Jamaica, and while
(23:21):
it was his first book about the work he did
while he was there, it was not his last. He
compiled a much larger project in two volumes titled in brevity,
The Natural History of Jamaica. Natural History of Jamaica, which
is also titled A Voyage to the Islands Madeira, Barbados, Nevis,
Saint Christopher's and Jamaica, took a long time to complete.
(23:44):
His first volume was published in seventeen oh seven, eleven
years after the Plant Catalog, and it was another eighteen
years before he published the second volume. There's an event
that takes place in seventeen fourteen associated with Sloane that's
differ dificult to substantiate, although it does make sense given
some of the things that happened after it. So it's
(24:06):
often been repeated that as Queen Anne was on her
deathbed that year, Sloane cared for her, and while she
was ill, there was a Tory move to try to
put an exiled Stewart on the throne. And the part
of all of this that is alleged to involve Sloan
is that he is believed, although there is not hard proof,
to have kept Queen Anne alive long enough to get
(24:26):
the documentation in place to ensure the Hanoverian succession and
the coronation of King George the First. King George the
First also held Sloane as his personal physician, and in
seventeen sixteen Hans Sloane became a baronet by order of
the king. It was extremely unusual for a physician, no
(24:47):
matter how well known or respected, to be granted a
hereditary title. In fact, it had never happened before this,
and one theory is that this was a form of
thank you from George the First for Sloane's service in
securing the hanover throne. We don't really know that for sure,
and we probably never will, but we do know something
(25:10):
quite interesting about the time that Sloane served George the First.
It was while he was the king's physician that Sloane
adopted the policy that the entire royal family should receive
smallpox inoculations. He had also had his own family inoculated,
which was very forward thinking. Edward Jenner's work to find
(25:31):
a smallpox vaccine was still decades away, but this is
another instance where progressive work came at a human cost.
Sloane tested the process on incarcerated men in Newgate Jail
before administering inoculations to the Royal family. After suffering a
stroke in June of seventeen twenty seven, George the First
(25:52):
died and he was succeeded by his son, George the Second, who,
like the previous two monarchs, kept Hans Sloane on as
a Royal physician eight years before George the seconds ascension.
In seventeen nineteen, the Royal College of Physicians elected Hans
Sloan its president and he held that post for the
next sixteen years. During his time as President of the
(26:16):
Royal College of Physicians, Sloane also served as President of
the Royal Society. He gained that position in seventeen twenty
seven and he served in that role for fourteen years.
So for eight years he was helming both of those
societies at the same time. Kind of makes him like
the Grand Puba of all things science in London. He
(26:38):
ended his presidency with the Royal Society in seventeen forty
one when he retired from his work. But though he
wasn't in active practice or holding office with any professional societies,
Sloane was not idle in his retirement. Throughout his career
in medicine, Sloan had been particularly interested in ie health.
(26:58):
In seventeen forty five he published Account of a Medicine
for soreness, weakness, and other distempers of the eyes. We're
going to take a break here to hear from the
sponsors who keep stuff you missed in history class going,
and when we come back, we're actually going to backtrack
on the timeline just a little bit to focus on
Sir Hans Sloan's collection of specimens and their fate. After
(27:30):
his trip as a young physician to Jamaica, Sloan was
completely bitten by the collecting bug, and he continued to
gather specimens even when he wasn't traveling. He developed a
network and had people that would go out and seek
out collections and buy them for him, and he also
did this by acquiring other collectors' collections. For example, when
(27:50):
William Charlton died in seventeen oh two, Sloane got his
cabinet of curiosities. Charlton, whose name had been Courting before
he changed it, was from a very wealthy family that
had made a fortune in the Caribbean starting in the
sixteen twenties, so another example of a collection that clearly
was built on the back of enslaved labor. Charlton was
(28:13):
a member of Sloane's social circle, as was apothecary James Pettiver,
who had also assembled an impressive collection, which Sloane got
when Petiver died in seventeen eighteen. His collection became so
enormous that his house at number three Bloomsbury, where he
and Elizabeth had moved in seventeen hundred, was bursting, and
(28:35):
so he bought the house next door as well. By
the time he purchased Number four Bloomsbury, he had become
a well known and well respected name, not just in
England but throughout Europe, and as a consequence, he and
Elizabeth entertained a lot of famous visitors. Carl Naeus came
to see Sloane's remarkable assortment of specimens. Hans Sloan had
(28:58):
to move his collection one more time in seventeen forty
two to a space that could better accommodate it. That
was a manor house in Chelsea, where King Henry the
Eighth had once lived, and it was right next to
the Chelsea Physic Garden. That was the place where he
had studied plants in his early years to memorize them.
He continued to receive an array of famous guests there
(29:20):
for visits. The Sloane home was not open to the public,
but people could use their social connections to basically be like,
do you know Sir Hans Sloan? Can you get me
in touch with them? And then they would make appointments
and come to the house and see everything. Sloan's retirement
in seventeen forty one had not been due to a
desire to do less. It was because he was physically
(29:43):
unable to keep going at the pace that he had
maintained for decades. He had been having some sort of
ailment or condition that caused paralysis at times. As we mentioned,
he did continue to work as much as he could
for as long as he could. Sloane died on January eleventh,
seventeen fifty three, in London, and he was ninety two.
(30:07):
His death announcement in the papers read quote Thursday morning.
Died at his house in Chelsea, very much advanced in years,
but blessed with all his faculties of understanding. To the
last of his life, Sir Hans Sloane baronet. During Sloane's life,
he had amassed a collection of more than seventy one
thousand items and more than fifty thousand books. What happens
(30:31):
to such a collection when its owner passes without heirs
who want to deal with it. Remember, he had only
surviving daughters. While he was on his deathbed, he stated
that he wished to bequeath his massive collection to Britain,
but though the collection was a gift, it could only
be given if Parliament agreed to pay twenty thousand pounds
so that his executors could manage the transfer and any
(30:54):
necessary work that came with it, and so that the
collection could be open to the public. That had been
Sloane's aim in his collecting for quite some time. He
had believed for years that he was putting together a
repository of information for Britain. Parliament agreed to his terms,
and when Sloane passed, the whole lot became the property
(31:16):
of the country, and this is how the collection of
the British Museum began. This provision Sloane made that his
possessions should be conveyed to the government so they could
launch a public museum. Was like many things about his life.
Unusual museums before this and most of Europe were operated
by churches or royal houses. This concept of a museum
(31:37):
that anyone could visit was quite novel. The British Museum
Act seventeen fifty three established the British Museum on paper
and provided for the acquisition of Sloane's collection, as well
as other manuscript collections. It provided for the world's first free,
national public museum. Over the next several years, a building
(31:59):
was a coincidentally near one of Sloane's early homes in London,
and in seventeen fifty nine the British Museum opened its doors.
This was not the only museum to get parts of
Sloane's life's work. The Natural History Museum is home to
his collection of one hundred twenty thousand dried plant samples,
which are contained in nearly three hundred volumes. Sloane had
(32:23):
stipulated in his will that his collection had to remain
in the city of London, quote where they may, by
the great confluence of people, be most used. He had
also stipulated that the collection not be separated. The Natural
History Museum didn't get the plant collection until the eighteen eighties,
and it is in the city, so it still falls
(32:43):
more or less in the spirit of his wishes. According
to the museum, this plant collection quote is the largest
surviving botanical collection from the early modern period, about fifteen
hundred to eighteen hundred, and contains plants collected in more
than seventy countries and territory worldwide. Antarctica and Australasia are
(33:03):
the only continents not represented. In nineteen seventy three, the
British Library also got some of Sloan's books and manuscripts,
and while there have been a lot of efforts made
at conservation and specially built spaces to house the collection
in its various homes, there have been some pieces lost
(33:23):
over the years, particularly some of his preserved small animal
specimens like lizards and birds. Some of those have not survived.
Some did not even survive When he was alive. There
are stories of his friends dropping stuff, for like putting
their drinks on top of manuscripts and really getting him
quite angry. Everything he ever collected was not there when
(33:48):
he passed. Today there is a statue of Sir Hans
Sloan in the Chelsea Physic Garden. A statue was first
dedicated to him there in the years immediately following his death.
Then in two thousand and two, Queen Elizabeth the Second
unveiled a copy of the statue in Sloane's hometown of Killiele,
and in twenty fourteen the Physic Garden got a new
(34:08):
version of the Sloane statue after the first one had
become quite brittle and was breaking down. Sir Hon Sloan,
I have feelings. I have listener mail from our listener,
Sarah Grayton, and I'm reading this too late to fix
the thing that she says we should fix. Sarah writes, Hey,
(34:30):
Ali and Tracy, just to start, I love your podcast
and I've been listening for years. I've learned so much
while enjoying myself. Thank you. I wanted to give you
a heads up about your use of the term British
Isles in your recent episode, as I know you are
both sensitive to the correct terms to use. While I
know it is used as a geographical term, it is
controversial as it implies ownership of the entire island of
(34:51):
Ireland by the United Kingdom. The Irish government does not
recognize the term and discourages its use. Irish people generally
prefer to just say Ireland Britain. I think it's important
to use terms that are acceptable to both British and
Irish people. Thanks. I don't have a pet myself allergies,
but I attach a pet tax my brother's king Charles Liz,
who is just the best dog ever, best regard, Sarah.
(35:15):
This is one of those things where I asked an
Irish person, but they were Irish American and they were like,
I think that's cool. So you know my apology. I
feel like we had a conversation about this in the
show sometime very long ago, because I tend to default
more to saying Britain and Ireland when we're recording stuff.
But I have also heard people that live in the
(35:38):
other islands that are also part of Britain feeling excluded
by that language. So it's one of those things where
I have felt like there's not one perfect term yes
that works the best. Yes. So you know, as you
are correct, we never want to make anybody feel excluded
or offended, but it is a little bit of tricky
yeah footing to actually find something that makes everybody yeah,
(36:00):
feel included and acknowledged. So I surely apologize to anybody
who did, feel, of course, excluded or or hurt in
some way by that. Yeah, and if any of those
ghosts were chagrined, also to them, although many of them
go back far enough that the modern politics and thinking
(36:22):
is probably a mystery to them as well. But thank you,
I really do appreciate it, Sarah. If you would like
to write us, you can do so at History Podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to the
podcast on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
(36:45):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I was in London
a few weeks ago and I finally went to the
British Museum, Yeah, which I loved. There's a cool thing
(00:24):
there that I didn't realize in its layout, which is
that the early areas of the museum that you passed
through are really fascinating because they're set up almost as
though you're walking through a grand personal study where someone's
personal collection is housed. And that's because you kind of
are what sets it off. And what confused me initially
(00:48):
is that there aren't a lot of like placards and
shelf talkers telling you what you're looking at. You can
find that information if you look for it. And then
you come across the bar of Sir Hans Sloan, and
there's lots of signage about him and his legacy, and
that's because most of the things you're looking at are
things he collected in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or
(01:10):
replicas of those things. Like it's kind of purposely made
to look like here is his personal collection, and then
there's more. Once you get in through that into the
museum proper, you get to see all the cool stuff
like the Rosetta Stone and whatnot. But we don't get
a whole lot of Hans Sloan education in the US.
(01:31):
I didn't that I can recall. I don't think i'd
ever heard his name before. Honestly, I knew about him,
but only because of reading that I have done as
an adult, like connected to this podcast. So I decided
he would be an interesting topic. His legacy, as acknowledged
by the British Museum is mixed. He is the reason
there's a British Museum, but there are a lot of
(01:52):
problematic aspects to the way that he gathered his collection
and really like the resources that enabled him to do so.
So we're going to talk about him today. Yeah, I
think there are also some problematic aspects to the British
Museum more broadly, but that's like way beyond the scope
of today. Oh, for sure, We've talked about it multiple times, right,
(02:13):
Like our whole episodes on the Elgin Marbles discuss all
of those problems at length. Yeah, there are multiple issues, Yeah,
but they're pretty forthright about his problems, I will say so.
Hans Sloan was born on April sixteenth, sixteen sixty in Killiele, Ulster, County,
(02:35):
Down Ireland that sits on the east coast of what's
now Northern Ireland, southeast of Belfast. He happened to be
born the same year the Royal Society was founded, and
that would become an important part of his life. The
Sloane family was not wealthy, but they were in a
unique position. Hans's parents, Alexander Sloan and Sarah Hicks Sloane,
(02:59):
had each moved to Killyle from Scotland as servants of
the wealthy Protestants who had moved there as part of
the plantation of Ulster. We also talked about the plantation
of Ulster recently. Alexander and Sarah had met in Ulster
and gotten married, and Hans was their seventh and last child,
(03:19):
but one of only three who survived childhood. His surviving
older brothers, James and William, became a lawyer and a merchant.
Because this Loans were part of a colony that was
established on seized land, there was a degree of privilege,
even for those who were working in service to the
aristocracy that had been granted that land. Biographer James del
(03:43):
Borgo notes in his book Collecting the World quote he
likely enjoyed highly cordial, if not familial, relations with the
aristocratic Hamiltons, whose company appears to have lent him an
easy sociability around persons of different rank, which was later
to be one of the hallmarks of his own extensive
social circles. From an early age, plants fascinated Hans, and
(04:08):
he also loved exploring and learning about nature in general.
He is said to have wandered all over that land
that di Hamilton's had been granted. He wrote as an
adult that he was quote very much pleased with the
study of plants and other parts of nature, and that
he had observed nature out in the fields in his childhood,
as well as when visiting other people who had collected
(04:31):
various natural items. He also described, for example, watching pete
be dug up to be used as fuel and being
very intrigued by all of the root systems that were
revealed when that pete was pulled up from the earth,
and he also noticed that animal skeletons and sometimes even
pieces of gold were entangled in the roots. He to
(04:52):
Tracy's Dismay was a fan of the coin Horde. He
started his own little collections as a kis with plants
and things like seagull eggs that he found around home.
As a teenager, Sloane went through some sort of horrible
illness described as a violent hemorrhage. This illness stopped his
(05:13):
life in its tracks for several years, from the ages
of sixteen until nineteen. He rarely left his room, and
he had very frequent bouts of coughing, in which he
would spit up blood. Sloane would occasionally have this problem
crop up throughout his life. He lived longer than average,
though This early experience made him take his health really
(05:37):
seriously and he was extremely cautious regarding his diet. He
drank very little. This may have also informed his decision
to study medicine. Yeah, when we say he drank very little,
we mean alcohol. He was big on hydration, as you'll
hear in a little while. When it came time for
higher education, Sloane studied medicine, first in London and then
(05:57):
in France. And of course this is a time when
the path to a medical degree was quite different than
it would be today. While in London, he kind of
went the root of an apothecary and he learned how
to prepare plants for medicinal purposes from a chemist who
had moved to the city from Germany named Nikolaus Staphorst.
This was in addition to a number of other things
that Sloane did as a little bit of a sort
(06:20):
of self directed study. He often visited the physic Garden
in Chelsea to study plants and to learn to tell
them apart on site, and he also made an effort
to just connect with like minded people who could help
him along in his learning and teach him what they knew. Next,
Sloane went to France, where he attended the University of
Orange and graduated with his medical degree from there in
(06:43):
sixteen eighty three. He had read the work of a
number of notable French scientists and physicians before he went there,
and he was able to reach out to some of
those authors to further extend his network of colleagues and mentors.
One of the men he befriended was botanist Joseph Pitton
div Turnfort, who is now recognized for laying the foundation
(07:06):
of plant classification. That idea of classification of plants and
animals that had not already been identified was something that
tourn four was really driven by, and it no doubt
influenced Sloane in his own collecting of specimens when he
had the opportunity to travel a few years later. Yeah,
there was a whole ideology of like, we could lose
(07:28):
any of this at any time, we need to collect
and catalog all of it so we know what we
have on earth. And that was a lot of what
Sloane bought into. So after getting his medical degree, Sloane
spent another two years in France before he moved back
to London, and though he was still fairly young, he
was just twenty five at the time. He was elected
(07:48):
to the Royal Society as a fellow in sixteen eighty five,
and his next step was to actually practice medicine, which
he did under the mentorship of Thomas Sydenham. In sixteen
eighty nine, opened up his own medical practice out of
his home in London. Uh that was not uncommon for
doctors at the time. They often worked out of their houses.
(08:09):
When Hans was twenty seven, two important things happened. First,
he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.
That's something that comes up pretty frequently on the show,
but we don't usually note what a true distinction that was.
At the time, there were only a couple dozen men
who had been given that distinction, So this was a
very small select group. Yeah, I think I read a
(08:33):
stat and don't quote me that by the mid eighteen
hundreds it was still like less than fifty people. It
was not something that everybody just got by virtue of practicing. Second,
he was offered the chance to go to Jamaica as
a personal doctor to the island's new British governor, Christopher Munk,
(08:53):
second Duke of Albemarle. Sloan and Monk had actually met
before Sloan had gotten his medical credentials in so they
did have a degree of familiarity with one another. This
was really a dangerous job offer. The travel to get
there alone was likely to encounter any number of problems,
and this was smack dab in the middle of what's
(09:15):
known as the Golden Age of piracy, with the Caribbean
known as an especially active place in that regard. Several
of Hans Sloan's friends tried to persuade him to turn
down the appointment, but he managed to get a lot
of money and a lot of authority as part of
the deal, and so he took it. He was to
be paid six hundred pounds a year, plus another three
(09:37):
hundred pounds up front as sort of a signing bonus,
and he was not only in charge of Monk's healthcare,
but of the entire fleet, and then when he got there,
of basically everyone and everything that lived on the grounds.
So that meant that he also was getting a management
position as he helmed the team of physicians and apothecaries
that would be there as well as on the journey.
(09:59):
The trip with Monk was destined to be the beginning
of an impressive lifelong collection for Sloan, but that wasn't
something that was born solely of his own desires. When
he left London to cross the Atlantic, he carried with
him requests to collect samples from a number of his
colleagues in the medical field, some of them had been
the ones to urge him not to go. During this
(10:22):
time at sea, he made notes regarding his observations of
the things he could see in the ocean, referencing dolphins, jellyfish, birds,
and phosphorescence, among other things. Yeah, I love that His
friends were like, don't go, don't go, don't go. Well,
if you're going anyway, here's my wish list as why
as you're there. Coming up, we're going to talk about
(10:42):
Sloan's time in Jamaica, but first we will pause for
a sponsor break. After the three month long voyage it
took to get to Jamaica, Sloan was away from London
for another fifteen months. He didn't only go to Jamaica.
(11:05):
He also visited Barbados, Saint Kitts, and Nevis, and he
made additional stops throughout the Caribbean. And he collected specimens
on all of his travels, hundreds of them. Some accounts
put the number around eight hundred, but some note that
as exclusively the number of plant samples he acquired, and
he did also collect various fauna. This was by no
(11:28):
means the entirety of the collection he would eventually have,
and we will talk more about that in just a bit.
Floane's impression of life in Jamaica was a little bit odd.
He thought, for example, that the meat of the turtles
there was causing a blood infection in the people who
ate it. He noted that people sweated heavily. Medicine in
(11:49):
the seventeenth century was still grappling with a lot of
the concepts that are pretty well understood today. By the
time Sloane was in Jamaica, For example, scientists had understood
that blood flowed through the body thanks to the pumping
of the heart for about fifty years. They understood that
humans and most animals require oxygen to breathe. That was
(12:12):
a concept less than thirty years old, and there were
still plenty of physicians who believed in diagnosing patients based
on Galen's system of the four humors. Clone was really
ahead of the game and a lot of ways when
it came to medical ideology. Though one of the things
he advocated for was that everyone drink more water and
less alcohol. Doesn't seem as though that was a well
(12:35):
accepted piece of advice. The popular belief at the time
was that you needed to drink alcohol to digest food
better in hot climates. That one really kind of flummockses
to me, because I love a cocktail, but drinking alcohol
when it's really hot out is kind of nightmarish to me,
So I'm like, why, why it does seem likely that
(13:00):
Sloane would have stayed in the Caribbean for much longer
had it not been for the fact that his employer died.
According to the History of Parliament that is online, Monk
liked Jamaica, but it didn't really like him back quote.
His principal achievement was the recovery of a wrecked Spanish
treasure ship, the first successful salvage operation of modern times,
(13:21):
which brought him and estimated forty eight thousand pounds for
an investment of eight hundred pounds. But he did not
enjoy his wealth for long. Drink and the climate finished
him off on six October sixteen eighty eight. Monk was
really young when he died, just thirty five, and there
isn't a whole lot of information about his death and
(13:42):
what sorts of attention Sloan may have given him as
his doctor. In Sloane's own words, Sloane made some notes
about Monk's health, noting that he didn't seem entirely healthy
even before the trip started. We also know that he
bled Monk as a treatment on occasion, and he gave
him medicine for jaundice. Monk had a history of heavy drinking,
(14:03):
and it seemed that he continued to do so in
Jamaica despite all advice against it from Sloane as well
as other physicians. And it is from those other physicians
that we actually have the information that we do about
Monk's case. Sloan left it out of his published accounts,
perhaps out of respect or gauging by the accounts that
do exist, because it sounds like a truly awful end
(14:26):
that maybe Sloane did not think would be appropriate for
all readers. Even post mortem. The body of the Duke
proved to be a challenging case for Sloane. It fell
to him to figure out how to preserve his employer's
remains for transit across the Atlantic when he had died
in a climate where the locals insisted that you had
to bury a body within twelve hours. The idea was
(14:50):
the heat accelerated decomposition so much you had to do
it that quickly. After an extensive preparation that involved removing
some organs, filling the box with powder to dry it out,
and wrapping it in linen that had been soaked in
a mix of resin, wax and fat, Monk's body was
sealed into a coffin covered with pitch and shipped back
(15:10):
to England for burial. At that time, Sloane's time in
the Caribbean came to a close, and during that time
in the Caribbean, all of monks and Sloans and other
people's activities on Jamaica were of course made possible by
enslaved labor. The colonization of Jamaica goes all the way
back to Columbus, when he claimed the island for Spain,
(15:32):
even though there were people there already. In the early
fifteen hundred, Spain built a settlement on Jamaica and enslaved
the indigenous population of the island, the Arawaks. They sometimes
go by other names as well. In addition to being
worked to death, many Arawoks died as a result of
exposure to diseases that were brought by the Spanish, and
the high death rate of that indigenous population led the
(15:55):
Spanish to start bringing in enslaved people from Africa to
the island to fill those losses of the enslaved workforce.
In sixteen fifty five, Britain battled Spain over possession of
Jamaica and one and in sixteen seventy Britain formally took
possession of the island. From there, the slave trade that
went through Jamaica ramped up considerably. This is a very
(16:19):
simplified and quick overview of how we get to the
point where Hans Sloane was there. We have an episode,
for example, on the Maroon Wars in the archive from
twenty seventeen that covers two uprisings of the enslaved people
of the island against the British colonists who ruled there.
There is a lot more history and nuance to all
of that, but we just want to make clear what
(16:40):
was going on. Additionally, Sloane was actively involved in behaviors
as a doctor that exploited the black enslaved workforce, particularly
the women. There are instances in his notes where he
prescribes that patients should drink breast milk from enslaved black women.
He also add that enslaved women should serve as wet
(17:02):
nurses for the families of white colonists. But when it
came to treating illnesses in the black population, which was
something that was absolutely part of his job, Sloane's notes
indicate that he was less likely to believe them when
they described their symptoms than he would his white patients. Overall,
his writing about the non white population is lace throughout
(17:25):
with racism and a sense of superiority. It broke my
heart reading that, because these are problems that persist today
in the medical community of listening to black people and
other people of color when they talk about how they
don't feel well, and it was going on in the
sixteen hundreds as well. But the most Germane part of
(17:49):
this story is that while there is a lot of
discussion about Sloan collecting various flora and fauna on Jamaica,
in most cases those samples were procured for him I
enslaved people from West Africa. According to the British Museum,
most of those people could be traced back to Ghana
and Cotduvoir. And that was not only a matter of
(18:10):
those people gathering samples at the direction of Sloan. These
were people that had a deep understanding and knowledge about
the flora of the island and that heavily informed the
direction of the collection. So as we talk about his
immense collection and others that belonged to various British collectors
that would eventually come into his possession, the work involved
(18:31):
in gathering those materials has to be credited to enslaved people.
There is also another way in which slavery directly benefited
Sloan's collecting that we're going to talk about in just
a moment. One of the more fun sides to the
story of the Jamaica trip, but one that we have
to do some myth busting on, has to do with chocolate.
(18:52):
Sloane is said to have discovered while there a local
beverage made using the cacal plant, but he didn't really
care for it. It upset his stomach and it was
too bitter, so he decided to doctor it up by
making it with milk instead of with water, and that
version he loved. When he got back to London, he
started making it there. Sloane touted the health benefits as
(19:16):
well as the deliciousness of his drink, and soon it
started popping up as an offering at London's apothecaries. And
the story goes that Sloane's cacaw drink got the attention
of a name that will likely be familiar to listeners,
and that is the Cadbury Brothers, and from there it
became a retail sensation. But that story isn't really accurate.
(19:37):
The story is often held up as the tale of
Hanslane inventing milk chocolate or hot chocolate or both, but
it's a bit more complicated than that. Milk chocolate absolutely
already existed. There were even recipes for it available in
England well before Sloane's trip. There were also versions of
(19:59):
hot chocol drinks made with milk and cinnamon in Jamaica
before he got there. It does seem like he encountered
it for the first time when he arrived there, and
he might have even believed that he invented it. He
definitely prescribed chocolate and milky hot chocolate beverages as a
health drink once he was back in London, but he
(20:21):
was also not the only physician to do that, nor
was he the first. This seems more than anything to
be a case where name recognition kind of drives the
bus with this whole narrative, because most people knew his name,
that name was used on commercially produced chocolate products in
England and along the line, there was just a mythology
(20:43):
that developed of his having invented it. Yeah, the Slow
name has persisted into very modern times. As part of
the Chocolate Legacy of England. After returning to London in
sixteen ninety three, slow And became the Secretary of the
Royal Society, and in this role he actually had a
(21:04):
fairly significant impact. He restarted the publication of philosophical transactions
and he expanded its offerings. He also picked back up
with his medical practice. Despite having lost his first very
high profile patient at a pretty early age, Sloan was
in demand among the most powerful and important people in Britain.
(21:26):
He continued to be the personal physician for the Duke
of Albemarle's widow, and he became Physician Extraordinary to Queen Anne.
He actually had quite an impressive collection of patients, which
included names like John Locke, Samuel Peeps and recent frequent
mention on the show Robert Walpole, among others. He was
also employed as a physician at Christ's Hospital, which was
(21:48):
a charity hospital that offered care to London's poor citizens.
On May eleventh, sixteen ninety five, Sloane married a woman
named Elizabeth Langley Rose. Elizabeth was the widow of Folk Rose,
who was one of the doctors who, along with Sloane,
had treated the Duke of Albemarle in Jamaica. Before his death,
(22:10):
in addition to being a doctor, Rose had acquired several
estates and plantations in Jamaica. When Rose died in sixteen
ninety four, those passed to Elizabeth, and through Elizabeth, that
considerable worth passed to Hans Sloane, and that money enabled
him to continue collecting at a rate that would not
have been possible with only his income as a physician.
(22:34):
He received one third of the profits of the Rose plantations.
And this is the second way that slavery enabled his
work that we alluded to earlier. Sloane had enough money
coming in through Elizabeth's Caribbean properties that he was able
to donate the entirety of his salary at the Charity
Hospital back to that organization. He and Elizabeth had three children,
(22:58):
but only two, both of them daughters, survived until adulthood.
Several years after his trip to Jamaica, in sixteen ninety six,
Sloane published a project that he had been working on
since he completed his travels, and that was a catalog
of his plant collection from abroad. The Latin language catalog
was titled Catalogus Plantarum k in Insula Jamaica, and while
(23:21):
it was his first book about the work he did
while he was there, it was not his last. He
compiled a much larger project in two volumes titled in brevity,
The Natural History of Jamaica. Natural History of Jamaica, which
is also titled A Voyage to the Islands Madeira, Barbados, Nevis,
Saint Christopher's and Jamaica, took a long time to complete.
(23:44):
His first volume was published in seventeen oh seven, eleven
years after the Plant Catalog, and it was another eighteen
years before he published the second volume. There's an event
that takes place in seventeen fourteen associated with Sloane that's
differ dificult to substantiate, although it does make sense given
some of the things that happened after it. So it's
(24:06):
often been repeated that as Queen Anne was on her
deathbed that year, Sloane cared for her, and while she
was ill, there was a Tory move to try to
put an exiled Stewart on the throne. And the part
of all of this that is alleged to involve Sloan
is that he is believed, although there is not hard proof,
to have kept Queen Anne alive long enough to get
(24:26):
the documentation in place to ensure the Hanoverian succession and
the coronation of King George the First. King George the
First also held Sloane as his personal physician, and in
seventeen sixteen Hans Sloane became a baronet by order of
the king. It was extremely unusual for a physician, no
(24:47):
matter how well known or respected, to be granted a
hereditary title. In fact, it had never happened before this,
and one theory is that this was a form of
thank you from George the First for Sloane's service in
securing the hanover throne. We don't really know that for sure,
and we probably never will, but we do know something
(25:10):
quite interesting about the time that Sloane served George the First.
It was while he was the king's physician that Sloane
adopted the policy that the entire royal family should receive
smallpox inoculations. He had also had his own family inoculated,
which was very forward thinking. Edward Jenner's work to find
(25:31):
a smallpox vaccine was still decades away, but this is
another instance where progressive work came at a human cost.
Sloane tested the process on incarcerated men in Newgate Jail
before administering inoculations to the Royal family. After suffering a
stroke in June of seventeen twenty seven, George the First
(25:52):
died and he was succeeded by his son, George the Second, who,
like the previous two monarchs, kept Hans Sloane on as
a Royal physician eight years before George the seconds ascension.
In seventeen nineteen, the Royal College of Physicians elected Hans
Sloan its president and he held that post for the
next sixteen years. During his time as President of the
(26:16):
Royal College of Physicians, Sloane also served as President of
the Royal Society. He gained that position in seventeen twenty
seven and he served in that role for fourteen years.
So for eight years he was helming both of those
societies at the same time. Kind of makes him like
the Grand Puba of all things science in London. He
(26:38):
ended his presidency with the Royal Society in seventeen forty
one when he retired from his work. But though he
wasn't in active practice or holding office with any professional societies,
Sloane was not idle in his retirement. Throughout his career
in medicine, Sloan had been particularly interested in ie health.
(26:58):
In seventeen forty five he published Account of a Medicine
for soreness, weakness, and other distempers of the eyes. We're
going to take a break here to hear from the
sponsors who keep stuff you missed in history class going,
and when we come back, we're actually going to backtrack
on the timeline just a little bit to focus on
Sir Hans Sloan's collection of specimens and their fate. After
(27:30):
his trip as a young physician to Jamaica, Sloan was
completely bitten by the collecting bug, and he continued to
gather specimens even when he wasn't traveling. He developed a
network and had people that would go out and seek
out collections and buy them for him, and he also
did this by acquiring other collectors' collections. For example, when
(27:50):
William Charlton died in seventeen oh two, Sloane got his
cabinet of curiosities. Charlton, whose name had been Courting before
he changed it, was from a very wealthy family that
had made a fortune in the Caribbean starting in the
sixteen twenties, so another example of a collection that clearly
was built on the back of enslaved labor. Charlton was
(28:13):
a member of Sloane's social circle, as was apothecary James Pettiver,
who had also assembled an impressive collection, which Sloane got
when Petiver died in seventeen eighteen. His collection became so
enormous that his house at number three Bloomsbury, where he
and Elizabeth had moved in seventeen hundred, was bursting, and
(28:35):
so he bought the house next door as well. By
the time he purchased Number four Bloomsbury, he had become
a well known and well respected name, not just in
England but throughout Europe, and as a consequence, he and
Elizabeth entertained a lot of famous visitors. Carl Naeus came
to see Sloane's remarkable assortment of specimens. Hans Sloan had
(28:58):
to move his collection one more time in seventeen forty
two to a space that could better accommodate it. That
was a manor house in Chelsea, where King Henry the
Eighth had once lived, and it was right next to
the Chelsea Physic Garden. That was the place where he
had studied plants in his early years to memorize them.
He continued to receive an array of famous guests there
(29:20):
for visits. The Sloane home was not open to the public,
but people could use their social connections to basically be like,
do you know Sir Hans Sloan? Can you get me
in touch with them? And then they would make appointments
and come to the house and see everything. Sloan's retirement
in seventeen forty one had not been due to a
desire to do less. It was because he was physically
(29:43):
unable to keep going at the pace that he had
maintained for decades. He had been having some sort of
ailment or condition that caused paralysis at times. As we mentioned,
he did continue to work as much as he could
for as long as he could. Sloane died on January eleventh,
seventeen fifty three, in London, and he was ninety two.
(30:07):
His death announcement in the papers read quote Thursday morning.
Died at his house in Chelsea, very much advanced in years,
but blessed with all his faculties of understanding. To the
last of his life, Sir Hans Sloane baronet. During Sloane's life,
he had amassed a collection of more than seventy one
thousand items and more than fifty thousand books. What happens
(30:31):
to such a collection when its owner passes without heirs
who want to deal with it. Remember, he had only
surviving daughters. While he was on his deathbed, he stated
that he wished to bequeath his massive collection to Britain,
but though the collection was a gift, it could only
be given if Parliament agreed to pay twenty thousand pounds
so that his executors could manage the transfer and any
(30:54):
necessary work that came with it, and so that the
collection could be open to the public. That had been
Sloane's aim in his collecting for quite some time. He
had believed for years that he was putting together a
repository of information for Britain. Parliament agreed to his terms,
and when Sloane passed, the whole lot became the property
(31:16):
of the country, and this is how the collection of
the British Museum began. This provision Sloane made that his
possessions should be conveyed to the government so they could
launch a public museum. Was like many things about his life.
Unusual museums before this and most of Europe were operated
by churches or royal houses. This concept of a museum
(31:37):
that anyone could visit was quite novel. The British Museum
Act seventeen fifty three established the British Museum on paper
and provided for the acquisition of Sloane's collection, as well
as other manuscript collections. It provided for the world's first free,
national public museum. Over the next several years, a building
(31:59):
was a coincidentally near one of Sloane's early homes in London,
and in seventeen fifty nine the British Museum opened its doors.
This was not the only museum to get parts of
Sloane's life's work. The Natural History Museum is home to
his collection of one hundred twenty thousand dried plant samples,
which are contained in nearly three hundred volumes. Sloane had
(32:23):
stipulated in his will that his collection had to remain
in the city of London, quote where they may, by
the great confluence of people, be most used. He had
also stipulated that the collection not be separated. The Natural
History Museum didn't get the plant collection until the eighteen eighties,
and it is in the city, so it still falls
(32:43):
more or less in the spirit of his wishes. According
to the museum, this plant collection quote is the largest
surviving botanical collection from the early modern period, about fifteen
hundred to eighteen hundred, and contains plants collected in more
than seventy countries and territory worldwide. Antarctica and Australasia are
(33:03):
the only continents not represented. In nineteen seventy three, the
British Library also got some of Sloan's books and manuscripts,
and while there have been a lot of efforts made
at conservation and specially built spaces to house the collection
in its various homes, there have been some pieces lost
(33:23):
over the years, particularly some of his preserved small animal
specimens like lizards and birds. Some of those have not survived.
Some did not even survive When he was alive. There
are stories of his friends dropping stuff, for like putting
their drinks on top of manuscripts and really getting him
quite angry. Everything he ever collected was not there when
(33:48):
he passed. Today there is a statue of Sir Hans
Sloan in the Chelsea Physic Garden. A statue was first
dedicated to him there in the years immediately following his death.
Then in two thousand and two, Queen Elizabeth the Second
unveiled a copy of the statue in Sloane's hometown of Killiele,
and in twenty fourteen the Physic Garden got a new
(34:08):
version of the Sloane statue after the first one had
become quite brittle and was breaking down. Sir Hon Sloan,
I have feelings. I have listener mail from our listener,
Sarah Grayton, and I'm reading this too late to fix
the thing that she says we should fix. Sarah writes, Hey,
(34:30):
Ali and Tracy, just to start, I love your podcast
and I've been listening for years. I've learned so much
while enjoying myself. Thank you. I wanted to give you
a heads up about your use of the term British
Isles in your recent episode, as I know you are
both sensitive to the correct terms to use. While I
know it is used as a geographical term, it is
controversial as it implies ownership of the entire island of
(34:51):
Ireland by the United Kingdom. The Irish government does not
recognize the term and discourages its use. Irish people generally
prefer to just say Ireland Britain. I think it's important
to use terms that are acceptable to both British and
Irish people. Thanks. I don't have a pet myself allergies,
but I attach a pet tax my brother's king Charles Liz,
who is just the best dog ever, best regard, Sarah.
(35:15):
This is one of those things where I asked an
Irish person, but they were Irish American and they were like,
I think that's cool. So you know my apology. I
feel like we had a conversation about this in the
show sometime very long ago, because I tend to default
more to saying Britain and Ireland when we're recording stuff.
But I have also heard people that live in the
(35:38):
other islands that are also part of Britain feeling excluded
by that language. So it's one of those things where
I have felt like there's not one perfect term yes
that works the best. Yes. So you know, as you
are correct, we never want to make anybody feel excluded
or offended, but it is a little bit of tricky
yeah footing to actually find something that makes everybody yeah,
(36:00):
feel included and acknowledged. So I surely apologize to anybody
who did, feel, of course, excluded or or hurt in
some way by that. Yeah, and if any of those
ghosts were chagrined, also to them, although many of them
go back far enough that the modern politics and thinking
(36:22):
is probably a mystery to them as well. But thank you,
I really do appreciate it, Sarah. If you would like
to write us, you can do so at History Podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to the
podcast on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
(36:45):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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