Sir Hans Sloane, 1st Baronet (16 April 1660 – 11 January 1753) was an Anglo-Irish physician, naturalist, and collector. He 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.
Elected to the Royal Society at the age of 24, Sloane travelled to the Caribbean in 1687 and documented his travels and findings with extensive publications years later. Sloane was a renowned medical doctor among the aristocracy, and was elected to the Royal College of Physicians at age 27. Though he is credited with the invention of chocolate milk, it is more likely that he learned the practice of adding milk to drinking chocolate while living and working in Jamaica. Streets and places were later named after him, including Hans Place, Hans Crescent, and Sloane Square in and around Chelsea, London—the area of his final residence—and also Sir Hans Sloane Square in Killyleagh, his birthplace in Ulster.
Sloane's London estate was bequeathed to his daughter, Elizabeth, who was married to the 2nd Baron Cadogan, in which family the estate remains.
Sloane was born into a family of partial Ulster-Scots descent on 16 April 1660 at Killyleagh, a village on the south-western shores of Strangford Lough in County Down in Ulster, the northern province in Ireland. He was the seventh and last child of Alexander Sloane, who died when Hans was six years old. Alexander Sloane was a collector general of taxes for County Down and an agent for the Earl of Clanbrassil. His brother, James Sloane, was a Member of the Irish Parliament. It is said that Sarah Hicks (Hans's mother) was an Englishwoman who moved to Killyleagh as Anne Carey's companion when Anne married Lord Clanbrassil. 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 (or Clanbrassil) family and had much of their early tuition within the Killyleagh Castle library. Out of Alexander's sons, only three reached adulthood: Hans, William, and James. The graveyards of Henry and John Sloane can be found in Killyleagh's churchyard; both brothers died in their childhood. The eldest brother James was elected a Member of Parliament for Roscommon and Killyleagh in 1692. John Sloane later became an MP of Thetford and a barrister of the Inner Temple, spending most of his time in London.
Like many other Scots "Planters" in Ulster during the seventeenth century, the Sloane name was almost certainly of Gaelic origin, Sloane probably being an anglicisation of Ó Sluagháin.
As a youth, Sloane collected objects of natural history and other curiosities. This led him to the study of medicine, which he did in London, where he studied botany, materia medica, surgery and pharmacy. His collecting habits made him useful to John Ray and Robert Boyle. After four years in London he travelled through France, spending some time at Paris and Montpellier, and stayed long enough at the University of Orange-Nassau to take his MD degree there in 1683; he was hired as an assistant to prominent physician Thomas Sydenham who gave the young man valuable introductions to practice. He 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.
Sloane was elected to the Royal Society in 1685. In 1687, he became a fellow of the College of Physicians, and the same year went to Jamaica aboard HMS Assistance as personal physician to the new Governor of Jamaica, the 2nd Duke of Albemarle. Albemarle died in Jamaica the next year, 1688, so Sloane's visit lasted only fifteen months.
During his time in the Caribbean, Sloane visited several islands and collected more than 1,000 plant specimens as well as large supplies of cacao and Peruvian bark from which he later extracted quinine to treat eye ailments. Sloane noted about 800 new species of plants, which he catalogued in Latin in his Catalogus Plantarum Quae in Insula Jamaica Sponte Proveniunt (Catalogue of Jamaican Plants), published in 1696. His first writings about his trip appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, in which Sloane described Jamaican plants such as the Pepper Tree and the coffee-shrub, alongside accounts of the earthquakes that struck Lima in 1687 and Jamaica in 1687/1688 and 1692. In Sloane's work, Natural History of Jamaica, he describes for the Queen of England the Black ethnomusic of Jamaica. With the help of a local musician, he included the musical score and words of festival songs.
A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica. Vol. 1. Sloane. 1707.
A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St Christophers and Jamaica. Vol. 2. Sloane. 1725.
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. The couple had three daughters, Mary, Sarah and Elizabeth, and one son, Hans; only Sarah and Elizabeth survived infancy. Sarah married George Stanley of Paultons and Elizabeth married Charles Cadogan, who became 2nd Baron Cadogan. Once back in Britain, income from Sloane's career as a physician and his London property investments, coupled with Elizabeth's inheritance, enabled Sloane to build his substantial collection of natural history artefacts in the following decades. Sloane additionally had investments in the Royal African and South Sea Companies, both of which traded in slaves.
The Natural History Museum lists Sloane as the inventor of drinking chocolate with milk. However, according to historian James Delbourgo, the Jamaicans were brewing "a hot beverage brewed from shavings of freshly harvested cacao, boiled with milk and cinnamon" as far back as 1494. 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. Many recipes for mixing chocolate with spice, eggs, sugar and milk were in circulation by the seventeenth century. Sloane may have devised his own recipe for mixing chocolate with milk, though if so, he was probably not the first. (Some sources credit Daniel Peter as the inventor in 1875, using condensed milk; other sources point out that milk was added to chocolate centuries earlier in some countries.) By the 1750s, a Soho grocer named Nicholas Sanders claimed to be selling Sloane's recipe as a medicinal elixir, perhaps making "Sir Hans Sloane's Milk Chocolate" the first brand-name milk chocolate drink. By the nineteenth century, the Cadbury Brothers sold tins of drinking chocolate whose trade cards also invoked Sloane's recipe.
In 1707 Sloane listed the variety of punishments inflicted on slaves in Jamaica. For rebellion, slaves were usually punished "by nailing them down to the ground ... and then applying the fire by degrees from the feet and hands, burning them gradually up to the head, whereby their pains are extravagant." For lesser crimes, castration or mutilation ("chopping off half the foot") was the norm. And as for negligence, slaves "are usually whipt ... after they are whipt until they are raw, some put on their skins pepper and salt to make them smart; at other times their masters will drip melted wax on their skins, and use very exquisite torments."
Sloane started his own practice in 1689 at 3 Bloomsbury Place, London, Sloane worked among the upper classes where he was viewed as fashionable; he built a large practice which became lucrative. The physician served three successive sovereigns: Queen Anne, George I, and George II.
There was some criticism of Sloane during his lifetime as a mere "virtuoso", an undiscriminating collector who lacked understanding of scientific principles. One critic stated that he was merely interested in the collection of knick-knacks, and another called him the "foremost toyman of his time". Sir Isaac Newton described Sloane as "a villain and rascal" and "a very tricking fellow". Some believed that his true achievement was in making friends in high society and with important political figures, rather than in science. Even as a physician, he did not get a great deal of respect from many, being seen as primarily a seller of medications and a collector of curios. Sloane's only medical publication, an Account of a Medicine for Soreness, Weakness and other Distempers of the Eyes (London, 1745), was not published until its author was in his eighty-fifth year and had retired from practice.