1. Hans Sloane had a collection of 71,000 items which he bequeathed to the British nation, thus providing the foundation of the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum, London.
32 Facts About Hans Sloane
1. 2.
Hans Sloane was a renowned medical doctor among the aristocracy, and was elected to the Royal College of Physicians at age 27.
3.
Hans Sloane was the seventh and last child of Alexander Sloane who died when Hans was six years old.
4.
Alexander Sloane was a collector general of taxes for County Down and was an agent for the 1st Earl of Clanbrassil, and was a brother to James Sloane, MP.
5.
Sloane's paternal family were Ulster-Scots, having migrated from Ayrshire in the south-west of Scotland; they settled in east Ulster during the Plantation of Antrim and Down, which was slightly separate from the wider Plantation of Ulster, under King James VI and I The Sloane children, including Hans, were taken up by the Hamilton family and had much of their early tuition conducted within the Killyleagh Castle library.
6.
The graveyards of Henry and John Hans Sloane can be found in Killyleagh's parish courtyard; both brothers died in their childhood.
7.
John Hans Sloane later became an MP of Thetford and a barrister of the Inner Temple, spending most of his time in London.
8.
Hans Sloane's collecting habits made him useful to John Ray and Robert Boyle.
9.
Hans Sloane returned to London with a considerable collection of plants and other curiosities, of which the former were sent to Ray and utilised by him for his History of Plants.
10.
Albemarle died in Jamaica the next year, 1688, so Hans Sloane's visit lasted only fifteen months.
11.
Hans Sloane noted about 800 new species of plants, which he catalogued in Latin in his Catalogus Plantarum Quae in Insula Jamaica Sponte Proveniunt, published in 1696.
12.
Hans Sloane married Elizabeth Langley Rose, the widow of Fulke Rose of Jamaica, and daughter of Alderman John Langley, a wealthy heiress of sugar plantations in Jamaica worked by slaves.
13.
Hans Sloane additionally had investments in the Royal African and South Sea Companies, both of which traded in slaves.
14.
Hans Sloane encountered the cocoa bean while he was in Jamaica, where the local people drank it mixed with water, though he is reported to have found it nauseating.
15.
In 1707 Hans Sloane listed the variety of punishments inflicted on slaves in Jamaica.
16.
Hans Sloane started his own practice in 1689 at 3 Bloomsbury Place, London, Hans Sloane worked among the upper classes where he was viewed as fashionable; he built a large practice which became lucrative.
17.
In 1716 Hans Sloane was created a baronet, making him the first medical practitioner to receive a hereditary title.
18.
Hans Sloane was elected president of Royal College of Physicians in 1719 and served in that role until 1735.
19.
Hans Sloane became secretary to the Royal Society in 1693, and edited its Philosophical Transactions for twenty years.
20.
Hans Sloane retired from the Society at the age of eighty.
21.
In 1745, at the age of eighty-five, and after having retired from medical practice, Hans Sloane published his first medical work, Account of a Medicine for Soreness, Weakness and other Distempers of the Eyes.
22.
Hans Sloane helped out at Christ's Hospital from 1694 to 1730 and donated his salary back to that institution.
23.
Hans Sloane supported the Royal College of Physicians' dispensary of inexpensive medications and operated a free surgery every morning.
24.
Hans Sloane was a founding governor of London's Foundling Hospital, the nation's first institution to care for abandoned children.
25.
Inoculation was required for all children in its care; Hans Sloane was one of the physicians of that era who promoted inoculation as a method to prevent smallpox, using it on his own family and promoting it to the royal family.
26.
Hans Sloane had been introduced to the concept of inoculation by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the court of Queen Caroline.
27.
Over his lifetime, Hans Sloane collected over 71,000 objects: books, manuscripts, drawings, coins and medals, plant specimens and others.
28.
When Hans Sloane retired in 1741, his library and cabinet of curiosities, which he took with him from Bloomsbury to his house in Chelsea, had grown to be of unique value.
29.
Hans Sloane had acquired the extensive natural history collections of William Courten, Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualterio, James Petiver, Nehemiah Grew, Leonard Plukenet, the Duchess of Beaufort, Adam Buddle, Paul Hermann, Franz Kiggelaer and Herman Boerhaave.
30.
When Hans Sloane wrote his will not only did he say he wanted to sell his work to the Parliament for 20,000 pounds, he stated that he wanted his work to be seen by anyone who wanted to see it.
31.
Hans Sloane gave the Society of Apothecaries the land of the Chelsea Physic Garden which they had rented from the Chelsea estate since 1673.
32.
History Ireland contributor Tony Canavan, writing of the decision and observing the fact that the Hans Sloane family had moved to Ireland from Scotland during the Plantation of Ulster, noted that "the fact that Hans Sloane came from a Scots-Irish family who benefited from a different kind of plantation, following the expulsion of natives and the confiscation of their land, [which seemed] never to have been an issue".