Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum About this episode 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.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:33 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong?
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1:36 Tracy V. Wilson? The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back, and that's a Exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts.
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2:37 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
2:48 Holly Frey? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.
2:50 Tracy V. Wilson? And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:53 Holly Frey? I was in London a few weeks ago, and I finally went to the British Museum.
2:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
2:57 Holly Frey? Which I loved. There's a cool thing there that I didn't realize in its layout, which is that the early areas of the museum that you pass 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, is that there aren't a lot of placards and shelf talkers telling you what you're looking at.
3:31 Holly Frey? You can find that information if you look for it. And then you come across the bust of Sir Hans Sloane, 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 17th and 18th centuries, or 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 through that into the museum proper, you get to see all the cool stuff, like the Rosetta Stone and whatnot.
4:02 Tracy V. Wilson? But we don't get a whole lot of Hans Sloane education in the US. 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 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.
4:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, for sure. We've talked about it multiple times, right? Like, our whole episodes on the Elgin Marbles discuss all of those problems at length. Yeah, there are multiple issues. Yes. But they're pretty forthright about his problems, I will say.
5:04 Tracy V. Wilson? So Hans Sloane was born on April 16, 1660, in Killeyleigh Ulster, county 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 Sloane and Sarah Hicks Sloane, had each moved to Killeyleigh 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.
5:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Alexander and Sarah had met in Ulster and gotten married, and Hans was their seventh and last child, but one of only three who survived childhood. His surviving older brothers, James and William, became a lawyer and a merchant. Because the Sloanes 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 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
6:32 Tracy V. Wilson? around persons of different rank," which was later to become one of the hallmarks of his own extensive social circles.
6:41 Holly Frey? From an early age, plants fascinated Hans, and he also loved exploring and learning about nature in general. He is said to have wandered all over that land that the Hamiltons 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 various natural items. He also described, for example, watching peat be dug up to be used as fuel and being very intrigued by all of the root systems that were revealed when that peat was pulled up from the earth. And he also noticed that animal skeletons, and sometimes even pieces of gold, were entangled in the roots.
7:26 Holly Frey? He, to Tracy's dismay, was a fan of the coin hoard.
7:33 Holly Frey? He started his own little collections as a kid with plants and things like seagull eggs that he found around home.
7:40 Tracy V. Wilson? As a teenager, Sloane went through some sort of horrible illness described as a violent hemorrhage. This illness stopped his life in its tracks for several years. From the ages of 16 until 19, 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 seriously and he was extremely cautious regarding his diet. He drank very little. This may have also informed his decision to study medicine.
8:22 Holly Frey? Yeah, when we say he drank very little, we mean alcohol. He was, 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 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 route 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 Stopporst. This was in addition to a number of other things that Sloane did as a little bit of a sort of self-directed study. He often visited the physic garden in Chelsea to study plants and to learn to tell them apart on sight. And he also made an effort to just connect
9:07 Holly Frey? with like-minded people who could help him along in his learning and teach him what they knew.
9:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Next, Sloane went to France, where he attended the University of Orange and graduated with his medical degree from there in 1683. 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 Bitten de Tournefort, who is now recognized for laying the foundation of plant classification. That idea of classification of plants and animals that had not already been identified was something that Tournefort was really driven by, and it no doubt influenced Sloane in his own collecting of specimens when
9:57 Tracy V. Wilson? he had the opportunity to travel a few years later.
10:01 Holly Frey? Yeah, there was a whole ideology of like, we could lose 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 25 at the time, he was elected to the Royal Society as a fellow in 1685. And his next step was to actually practice medicine, which he did under the mentorship of Thomas Siddenham. In 1689, Hans opened up his own medical practice out of his home in London. That was not uncommon for doctors at the time. They often worked out of their houses.
10:45 Tracy V. Wilson? When Hans was 27, 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.
11:07 Holly Frey? Yeah, I think I read a stat, and don't quote me, that by the mid 1800s, it was still like less than 50 people.
11:17 Holly Frey? 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 Monk, Second Duke of Albemarle. Sloan and Monk had actually met before Sloan had gotten his medical credentials in France, 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 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.
12:03 Holly Frey? 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 600 pounds a year, plus another 300 pounds upfront 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.
12:35 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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 long as you're there. Coming up, we're going to talk about Sloan's time in Jamaica, but first we will
13:20 Tracy V. Wilson? pause for a sponsor break.
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14:54 Holly Frey? AT&T. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward?
15:39 Holly Frey? How do we best show up for each other? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
15:58 Holly Frey? After the three-month-long voyage it took to get to Jamaica, Sloane was away from London for another 15 months. He didn't only go to Jamaica. He also visited Barbados, St. 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 800, but some note that as exclusively the number of plant samples he acquired. And he did also collect various fauna. This was by no means the entirety of the collection he would eventually have, and we will talk more about that in just a bit.
16:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Sloane'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 the 17th 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 only understood that blood flowed through the body thanks to the pumping of the heart for about 50 years. They understood that humans and most animals require oxygen to breathe. That was a concept less than 30 years old. And there were still plenty of physicians who believed in diagnosing patients based on
17:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Galen's system of the four humors. Sloan was really ahead of the game in 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-accepted piece of advice. The popular belief at the time was that you needed to drink alcohol to digest food better in hot climates.
17:47 Holly Frey? That one really kind of flummoxes me because I, 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? Um, it does seem likely that Sloan 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, which brought him an estimated 48,000 pounds for an investment of 800 pounds. But he did not enjoy his wealth for long.
18:31 Holly Frey? Drink and the climate finished him off on 6 October 1688." Monk was really young when he died, just 35. And there isn't a whole lot of information about his death and what sorts of attention Sloan may have given him as his doctor in Sloan's own words. Sloan 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 and it seemed that he continued to do so in Jamaica despite all advice against it from Sloan as well as other physicians.
19:13 Holly Frey? 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 that maybe Sloan did not think would be appropriate for all readers.
19:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Even postmortem, 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 12 hours. The idea was the heat accelerated decomposition so much, you had to do it that quickly. After an extensive preparation that involved removing some organs, filling the body 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 to England for burial. At that time, Sloane's time in the Caribbean came to a close.
20:18 Holly Frey? And during that time in the Caribbean, all of Monk's and Sloane's 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, even though there were people there already. In the early 1500s, 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 Arawaks 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 Spanish to start bringing
20:59 Holly Frey? in enslaved people from Africa to the island to fill those losses of the enslaved workforce. In 1655, Britain battled Spain over possession of Jamaica and won, and in 1670, Britain formally took possession of the island. From there, the slave trade that went through Jamaica ramped up considerably. This is a very 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 2017. 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 was going on.
21:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Additionally, Sloan 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 advocated that enslaved women should serve as wet 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, Sloan'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 laced throughout with racism and a sense
22:29 Tracy V. Wilson? of superiority.
22:31 Holly Frey? 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 1600s as well. But the most germane part of 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 by enslaved people from West Africa. According to the British Museum, most of those people could be traced back to Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. And that was not only a matter of those people gathering samples at the direction of Sloan.
23:16 Holly Frey? 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 in gathering those materials has to be credited to enslaved people. There is also another way in which slavery directly benefited Sloane's collecting that we're going to talk about in just a moment.
23:46 Tracy V. Wilson? 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. Sloane is said to have discovered, while there, a local beverage made using the cacao 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 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 cacao drink got the attention of a name
24:29 Tracy V. Wilson? 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. This story is often held up as the tale of Hans Sloane 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 hot chocolate 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,
25:12 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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 that developed of his having invented it.
25:49 Holly Frey? Yeah, the Sloane name has persisted into...
25:53 Holly Frey? Very modern times as part of the chocolate legacy of England. After returning to London in 1693, Sloane became the secretary of the Royal Society. And in this role, he actually had a 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, Sloane was in demand among the most powerful and important people in Britain. He continued to be the personal physician for the Duke of Albemarle's widow, and he became physician extraordinary to Queen Anne.
26:36 Holly Frey? He actually had quite an impressive collection of patients, which included names like John Locke, Samuel Pepys, and recent frequent mention on the show, Robert Walpole, among others. He was also employed as a physician at Christ Hospital, which was a charity hospital that offered care to London's poor citizens.
26:54 Tracy V. Wilson? On May 11th, 1695, Sloane married a woman named Elizabeth Langley Rose. Elizabeth was the widow of Fulk Rose, who was one of the doctors who, along with Sloane, had treated the Duke of Albemarle in Jamaica before his death. In addition to being a doctor, Rose had acquired several estates and plantations in Jamaica. When Rose died in 1694, 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.
27:36 Tracy V. Wilson? 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, but only two, both of them daughters, survived until adulthood.
28:05 Holly Frey? Several years after his trip to Jamaica in 1696, 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 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.
28:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Natural History of Jamaica, which is also titled A Voyage to the Islands Madeira, Barbados, Nevis, St. Christopher's, and Jamaica, took a long time to complete. His first volume was published in 1707, 11 years after the plant catalog, and it was another 18 years before he published the second volume.
28:57 Holly Frey? There's an event that takes place in 1714 associated with Sloane that's difficult to substantiate, although it does make sense, given some of the things that happened after it. So it's 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 steward on the throne. And the part of all of this that is alleged to involve Sloane is that he is believed, although there is not hard proof, to have kept Queen Anne alive long enough to get the documentation in place to ensure the Hanoverian succession and the coronation of King George I.
29:37 Tracy V. Wilson? King George I also held Sloane as his personal physician. And in 1716, Hans Sloane became a baronet by order of the king. It was extremely unusual for a physician, no 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 I 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 quite interesting about the time that Sloane served George I. It was while he was the king's physician
30:19 Tracy V. Wilson? that Sloane adopted the policy that the entire royal family should receive smallpox inoculations.
30:26 Tracy V. Wilson? He had also had his own family inoculated, which was very forward thinking. Edward Jenner's work to find a smallpox vaccine was still decades away. But this is another instance where progressive work came at a human cost. Sloan tested the process on incarcerated men in Newgate Jail before administering inoculations to the royal family. After suffering a stroke in June of 1727, George I died and he was succeeded by his son, George II, who, like the previous two monarchs, kept Hans Sloan on as a royal physician.
31:04 Holly Frey? Eight years before George II's ascension in 1719, the Royal College of Physicians elected Hans Sloan its president, and he held that post for the next 16 years. During his time as president of the Royal College of Physicians, Sloan also served as president of the Royal Society. He gained that position in 1727, and he served in that role for 14 years. So for eight years, he was helping both of those societies at the same time. Kind of makes him like the grand poobah of all things science in London. He ended his presidency with the Royal Society in 1741, when he retired from his work.
31:46 Tracy V. Wilson? But though he wasn't in active practice or holding office with any professional societies, Sloan was not idle in his retirement. Throughout his career in medicine, Sloan had been particularly interested in eye health. In 1745, he published A Count of a Medicine for Soreness, Weakness, and Other Distempers of the Eyes.
32:09 Holly Frey? 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.
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32:56 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
33:41 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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35:02 Holly Frey? After 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 like seek out collections and buy them for him. And he also did this by acquiring other collectors' collections. For example, when William Charlton died in 1702, Sloan got his Cabinet of Curiosities. Charlton, whose name had been Courton before he changed it, was from a very wealthy family that had made a fortune in the Caribbean starting in the 1620s. So another example of a collection that clearly was built on the back of enslaved labor.
35:44 Holly Frey? Charlton was a member of Sloan's social circle, as was apothecary James Pettiver, who had also assembled an impressive collection, which Sloan got when Pettiver died in 1718.
35:57 Tracy V. Wilson? His collection became so enormous that his house at number three Bloomsbury, where he and Elizabeth had moved in 1700, was bursting. And 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 Linnaeus came to see Sloan's remarkable assortment of specimens.
36:29 Holly Frey? Hans Sloane had to move his collection one more time in 1742 to a space that could better accommodate it. That was a manor house in Chelsea where King Henry VIII 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 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 Sloane? Can you get me in touch with him?" And then they would make appointments and come to the house and see everything.
37:07 Tracy V. Wilson? Sloane's retirement in 1741 had not been due to a desire to do less. It was because he was physically 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 11, 1753, in London, and he was 92. 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,
37:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Sir Hans Sloane, Baronet."
37:54 Holly Frey? During Sloane's life, he had amassed a collection of more than 71,000 items and more than 50,000 books. What happens 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 £20,000 so that his executors could manage the transfer and any 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.
38:35 Holly Frey? 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 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 in most of Europe were operated by churches or royal houses. This concept of a museum that anyone could visit was quite novel.
39:12 Tracy V. Wilson? The British Museum Act 1753 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 was acquired, coincidentally, near one of Sloane's early homes in London. And in 1759, the British Museum opened its doors.
39:40 Holly Frey? 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 120,000 dried plant samples, which are contained in nearly 300 volumes. Sloane had 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 1880s, and it is in the city, so it still falls more or less in the spirit of his wishes. According to the museum, this plant collection, quote, "is the largest surviving botanical collection
40:24 Holly Frey? from the early modern period, about 1500 to 1800, and contains plants collected in more than 70 countries and territories worldwide. Antarctica and Australasia are the only continents not represented." In 1973, the British Library also got some of Sloane's books and manuscripts.
40:44 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 over the years, particularly some of his preserved small animal specimens like lizards and birds. Some of those have not survived.
41:04 Holly Frey? Some did not even survive when he was alive. There are stories of his friends dropping stuff or like putting their drinks on top of manuscripts and really getting him quite angry. Everything he ever collected was not there when he passed. Today, there is a statue of Sir Hans Sloane in the Chelsea Physic Garden. A statue was first dedicated to him there in the years immediately following his death. Then in 2002, Queen Elizabeth II unveiled a copy of the statue in Sloane's hometown of Kilmarnock. And in 2014, the Physic Garden got a new version of the Sloane statue after the first one had become quite brittle and was breaking down.
41:47 Holly Frey? Sir Hans Sloane.
41:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Hmm.
41:50 Holly Frey? I have feelings.
41:51 Tracy V. Wilson? Um.
41:54 Holly Frey? I have listener mail from our listener Sarah.
41:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Great.
41:57 Holly Frey? And I'm reading this too late to fix the thing that she says we should fix. Sarah writes, hey, Holly 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 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 and 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
42:42 Holly Frey? Liz, who is just the best dog ever. Best regard, Sarah. Um, this is one of those things where I asked an Irish person that they were Irish-American and they were like, I think that's cool. So, you know, my apologies.
42:55 Tracy V. Wilson? I also think, I feel like we had a conversation about this on 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 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.
43:18 Holly Frey? Yes.
43:19 Tracy V. Wilson? That works the best.
43:20 Holly Frey? Yes. So, um, you know, as you are correct, we never want to make anybody feel excluded or offended, but it is a little bit of tricky.
43:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
43:29 Holly Frey? footing to actually find something that makes everybody.
43:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
43:32 Holly Frey? Feel included and acknowledged. So.
43:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. I surely apologize to anybody who did feel.
43:38 Holly Frey? Of course.
43:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Excluded or, uh, or hurt in some way by that.
43:44 Holly Frey? Yeah. And if any of those ghosts were chagrined, also to them. Um, although many of them go back far enough that the modern politics and thinking is probably a mystery to them as well. Uh, but thank you. I really do appreciate it, Sarah. Uh, if you would like to write us, you can do so at [email protected] . You can also subscribe to the podcast on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
44:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
44:29 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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