Sir Hans Sloane - Founder of the British Museum, Failed by the British Museum
Sir Hans Sloane (Wellcome Images)
It was the large and remarkable collection of Sir Hans Sloane that provided the foundation of, not only the British Museum but the British Library and the National History Museum as well.
This giant of the Enlightenment period was born on 16 April 1660, in the village of Killyleagh in County Down, Ulster.
Growing up, he developed an interest in natural history, which led him to study medicine.
In London, he studied botany, surgery and the history of pharmacy before travelling to Paris, where he attended medical lectures, then Montpellier before taking his exams to become a Doctor of Medicine at the University of Orange in 1683.
All through his travels, he continued to collect plants and other items. By the time he returned to London, he’d amassed a considerable collection. He sent the plants to the naturalist, John Ray, which the latter used for his ‘History of Plants’, published between 1686 and 1704.
Sloane was elected to the Royal Society in 1685 and became a fellow of the College of Physicians in 1687.
In that same year, he was appointed as personal physician to the new Governor of Jamaica, Christopher Monck, the 2nd Duke of Albemarle.
The 2nd Duke of Albemarle, Christopher Monck (Wikipedia)
It was while in Jamaica that Sloane’s interest in collecting grew to, what might be considered, professional standards.
Sloane visited several islands in the Caribbean and collected more than 1,000 plant specimens, including Peruvian bark from which he would later extract quinine to treat eye ailments.
His first writings about his trip, in which he described Jamaican plants such as the pepper tree and the coffee-shrub, appeared in the ‘Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society’.
Of the plant specimens he collected, he noted about 800 new species of plants, which he catalogued in Latin. This formed the basis of his ‘Catalogus Plantarum Quae in Insula Jamaica Sponte Proveniunt’ (‘Catalogue of Jamaican Plants’), which was published in 1696.
Sloane’s time in Jamaica only lasted for 15 months as Albemarle died in October 1688.
Back in London, Sloane started his own practice at 3 Bloomsbury Place in 1689, coincidentally not far from the present British Museum building.
In 1695, he married Elizabeth Langley Rose, the widow of a sugar planter in Jamaica. The couple would go on to have 4 children, Mary, Sarah, Elizabeth and Hans. Unfortunately, Mary and Hans died while still young; Sarah and Elizabeth survived to adulthood.
All through, Sloane continued to build his extensive collection of natural history artifacts.
When Sloane was created a baronet in 1716, he became the first medical practitioner to receive a hereditary title.
In 1719, he became President of the Royal College of Physicians, and held the office for 16 years. In 1722, he was appointed physician-general to the army.
Having been made Secretary to the Royal Society in 1693, he was elected as its President in 1727, succeeding Sir Isaac Newton. He retired from the Society 13 years later, aged 80.
He was also appointed as first physician to King George II in 1727.
He had his fair share of critics. Some labelled him a mere “virtuoso”, who simply collected whatever caught his eye with little or no understanding of scientific principles. However, his time as, first, Secretary then President of the Royal Society left him with little time for pursuing his personal scientific research.
As President of the Royal Society, Sloane was able to act as an intermediary, bringing together the worlds of science, politics and high society. Thanks to his efforts, there was much sharing of knowledge between British and French scientists.
As he continued to purchase many natural and artificial curiosities from travellers of the expanding British Empire, Sloane took over the property next door to his to house his ever-expanding collection. Those who visited to view his collection included Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, and the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus.
In 1712, Sloane purchased the former residence of King Henry VIII, a manor house in Chelsea, to which he moved when he retired in 1741.
By this time, his collection had grown, in size and value. Apart from his personal collection, he’d also acquired the extensive collections of others, including William Courten; James Petiver, a London apothecary; Leonard Plukenet, Royal Professor of Botany and gardener to Queen Mary; the Duchess of Beaufort, Mary Somerset, who was Sloane’s neighbour, and a gardener and botanist…
… and the Dutch botanist, chemist and physician, Herman Boerhaave.
Herman Boerhaave ~ J Chapman (Wikipedia)
Sir Hans Sloane died on 11 January 1753 at his house in Chelsea. He was buried a week later at Chelsea Old Church.
The church is the only London church that has chained books, gifted to it by Sir Hans Sloane.
Sir Hans Sloane Monument - Tillmann Lenz (Wikipedia)
He is honoured in the area around his residence with place names such as Sloane Square. The land there is still owned by his descendants, the Cadogan family; his daughter, Elizabeth, had married General Charles Cadogan.
At his death, Sloane’s collection numbered over 70,000 objects and included books, manuscripts, drawings, plant specimens, and coins and medals, cameos and other curiosities.
Sloane had bequeathed his entire collection to King George II for the nation. His conditions – £20,000 to be paid to his heirs even though this sum was far lower than the value of the collection, and for Parliament to create a new, free public museum to exhibit it.
Parliament accepted the terms and on 7th June 1753, an Act of Parliament establishing the British Museum received the royal assent.
Thus, Sloane’s collections, along with other libraries and collections, became the foundation of the British Museum.
Later, the 50,000-odd books, manuscripts and prints were transferred to the British Library when it was built, while a herbarium of over 330 volumes of dried plants, and natural objects were taken to the Natural History Museum.
Nautilus shell at the Natural History Museum (own photo)
Nautilus shell (own photo)
Sir Hans Sloane’s bust was the first item on view when one entered the British Museum. It has now been removed.
Sir Hans Sloane, by Michael Rysbrack (Wikipedia)
But why, if he was the founding father of the museum?
Would it surprise you to learn it’s because of slavery?
The one blot that leaves a permanent stain, no matter the times one lived in.
No matter that slaves only featured in Sloane’s life because his wife inherited them from her first husband.
He himself didn’t buy or sell slaves but he did write about their ill-treatment.
It would appear that not campaigning against slavery is to be considered the overarching failure of his life despite the fact that the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787, 34 years after his death.
According to the museum’s present director, Hartwig Fischer, Sloane’s bust has been removed from its place of honour to another part of the museum to be included with other items labelled “the exploitative context of the British Empire”.
I am deeply disappointed and disgusted that those who run the museum I love are falling over themselves in the race to join others in the hollow act of virtue-signalling.
By removing the bust of the man responsible for the very creation of the British Museum – if it hadn’t been for his generous bequest, Parliament would not have passed an act establishing the museum – by falsely linking Sloane to the slave trade, Fischer has dishonoured the memory of a man far, far greater than he could ever hope to be.
Because there is so much more to Hans Sloane than collector, President of, both, the Royal Society, and the Royal College of Physicians; more than physician to royalty and physician-general of the army.
Between 1694 and 1730, Sloane helped at and donated his salary to Christ’s Hospital, a charity school, its core aim being to provide the chance of a better education to disadvantaged children.
He supported the Royal College of Physicians’ dispensary of medications and, every morning, operated a free surgery, ministering to the poor.
He was a founding governor of London’s Foundling Hospital, established by Thomas Coram, to care for abandoned children.
He promoted inoculation to fight smallpox and, as mentioned earlier, developed the use of quinine to treat eye-ailments; quinine was later used to treat malaria.
There is a bust of Sir Hans Sloane at the British Library, which has also benefitted from his bequest.
Sir Hans Sloane, by Michael Rysbrack, at the British Library (Wikipedia)
There are also busts of Sir Robert Cotton, whose Cottonian Library consisted of the richest private collection of manuscripts ever amassed, now housed at the British Library; Sir Joseph Banks, naturalist, botanist and patron of the natural sciences; and The Right Honourable Thomas Grenville, whose personal library of over 20,000 volumes now resides in the Library.
All four of these are to have their “labelling and presentation” reviewed to “help visitors understand them within their wider historical context”.
Because, according to the Library’s chief librarian, Liz Jolly, “racism is a creation of white people”.
I am honestly at the point of no longer knowing how to react to these people. Even if you haven’t been to other parts of the world… No. Let me reword that – especially if you haven’t been to other parts of the world, how can you say with so much certainty that racism is a creation of white people?
Racism was and still is present in countries like China, India, Africa before they even knew of the existence of white people. And when white people ventured into these regions, they were faced with racism from the locals.
As wonderfully multi-cultural as Malaysia, my birth country is, there is racism – low-key and blatant – between the Muslims, Indians and Chinese.
In countries like China and India, there is racism between those who speak different dialects.
But who cares about the facts, about things that most people know to be true, in the great virtue-signalling race to prove who is the wokest of them all.
It is thoroughly shameful when supposed learned people, including historians, believe it is acceptable to gloss over the life’s work of a man and reduce it to one label – an incorrect one, at that.