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THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Series One: The Papers of Sir Hans Sloane, 1660-1753, from the British Library, London

Part 6: The History of Medicine, Surgery and Anatomy

Part 7: The History of Medicine, Surgery and Anatomy

Publisher's Note

In brief biographical summaries, Sir Hans Sloane is often described as an antiquarian, a collector or a naturalist – all of which have merit as a description of his interests. But, if he had been asked to state his own profession, he would almost certainly have said that he was a physician. Medicine was not only his ‘day job’ – it was his lifelong passion. Medicine provided him with the opportunity to travel; it gave him access to elite society throughout Europe; and it was the area in which he was able to make a mark.

Born in Killyleagh, County Down, on 16 April 1660, Sloane took an interest in medicine at an early age. For instance, he noted that locals from Donegal had harvested and eaten Dulse (Palmaria Palmata – a type of red seaweed) for generations and that this had important medicinal benefits including the prevention of scurvy.

He took this interest in materia medica with him when he travelled to London in 1679 to study at Apothecaries Hall and their associated Physic Garden, which had been opened in 1673. He completed his studies in Europe, receiving an M D degree at the Medical School of the University of Orange in Leiden in 1683. During this time he also established friendships with such leading figures as John Ray, Robert Boyle, John Evelyn, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Pierre Magnol and William Courten. He was inspired by the desire to classify and name plants and by the pharmacological approach to botany.

Sloane returned to London in 1685 and, at the recommendation of Martin Lister, he was made a fellow of the fledgling Royal Society at the age of 24. This brought him into contact with Edmond Halley, Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton (whose Principia was published for the Society in 1686-7). In 1687 he was also made a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

In September 1687 he sailed for Jamaica as personal physician to the 2nd Duke of Albermarle and they arrived in December of that year. Sadly, the Duke died two months after landing but, during his 15 month stay on the islands, Sloane served as physician to other local notables (including Henry Morgan, the Welsh buccaneer) as well as gathering details on over 800 plant types. Morgan became Sloane’s second notable casualty – dying in August 1688 – but Sloane did leave an interesting account of Morgan’s last days. On a more positive note, Sloane also recorded the benefits of the local habit of imbibing a drink derived from the seeds of Theobroma cacao or the chocolate tree. He couldn’t stand the bitter taste himself, and so hit upon a method of combining milk with the drink and this was something he popularized as a medicinal draft on his return to London. Cadbury’s milk chocolate of the 19th century was based on his recipe.

Following news of the Glorious Revolution in England, Sloane sailed home with the Duchess of Albermarle on 16 March 1689. He took up residence in Great Russell Street (close to the current British Museum) and offered access to his own ‘Museum’ or ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ to all those interested. This included manuscripts, drawings, plant specimens, animal specimens, rocks and other artifacts. It confirmed his passion for collecting and over the next 64 years he was to build it up by donation and purchase (sometimes of entire collections) to be one of the finest collections in the world – and one of the foundational collections of the British Museum.

He also established a medical practice on his return to London and quickly built up a distinguished clientele. Samuel Pepys was one of his patients and he also did charitable work for institutions such as Christ’s Hospital, where he was appointed physician in 1694.

In 1693 Sloane was appointed Secretary of the Royal Society and revived the Philosophical Transactions, dormant since 1687. He uses his corresponding circle to gather papers and ideas, and oversaw new papers from John Wallis, Martin Lister, Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, Marcello Malpighi and John Locke amongst others.

In 1695 he married Elizabeth Rose, the widow of Fulk Rose of Jamaica, and the daughter of John Langley, Alderman of London. She subsequently gave birth to four children, two of which survived - Sarah who married George Stanley of Paultons, Hampshire and Elizabeth who became Lady Cadogan. After their marriage, they moved to No 3 Bloomsbury Place and the following year Sloane published his Catalogus Plantorum quae in Insula Jamaica sponte proveniunt (Catalogue of the Plants of Jamaica) which was enthusiastically received by John Ray and others.

Sloane was made a Correspondent of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1699 and was awarded an M D degree from Oxford in 1701. Sloane continued in his role as Secretary of the Royal Society during the entire period in which Sir Isaac Newton was President (1703-1713).

Sloane was repeatedly appointed to the important role of Censor for the Royal College of Physicians in 1705, 1709 and 1715 and published his second major work - A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbadoes, Nieves, St Christopher's and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the last – in 1707 (the second volume appeared in 1725). Meanwhile, the addition of significant manuscript and natural history collections from Charlton (Courten), Herman, Plukenet and Petivar forced him to acquire No 4 Bloomsbury Place to display them.

His position in elite society was confirmed in 1712 when he was appointed Physician to Queen Anne. He celebrated by purchasing Chelsea Manor, then in the country, which was built for Henry VIII, was lived in by Catherine Parr and served as the nursery of Elizabeth I. This included the rights to the three and a half acres of land comprising the famous Chelsea Physic Garden on which he had been taught. He subsequently conveyed the garden to the Apothecaries (who had leased it before) for £5 per annum and a guaranteed donation of 50 dried specimens of new plants to the Royal Society each year. The famous Rysbrack statue of Sloane was commissioned as a token of thanks.

Queen Anne died in 1714, but Sloane continued to receive royal patronage. In 1716 he received the treble distinction of being appointed as Physician to George I, being created a Baronet and was appointed Physician-General to the Army.

In 1719 he was elected as President of the Royal College of Physicians and he held the post until 1735. Lady Mary Montagu had recently pioneered idea of variolation against the smallpox, having witnessed the practice in Turkey, and Sloane enthusiastically championed this procedure. He was present during the inoculation of her 5 year old son and during the remarkable variolation performed on six prisoners at Newgate in 1721. The prisoners were offered royal pardons for co-operating with the experiment and all survived and walked free. By 1722 the process had gained such credibility that the daughters of the Princess of Wales were also submitted to treatment.

Sloane’s wife, Elizabeth, died in 1724, and he also lost friends such as Christopher Wren in 1723 and Isaac Newton in 1727. The latter left a vacancy for the Presidency of the Royal Society and Sloane was elected unanimously to fill the post. He served as President of the Royal Society for fifteen years from 1727 to 1741. One of his innovations was to introduce the Copley Medal as a reward for distinguished scientific endeavour. In 1727 he was also appointed Physician in Ordinary to George II.

1735 saw the publication of the Systema Naturae by Linnaeus, establishing a system of classification for plants and animals still used today. This is an area in which Sloane had always had a keen interest, following on from his work with Ray, and he helped to promote the work and its successor, the Genera Plantorum, which classified 18,000 species of plants using binomial nomenclature. Linnaeus was one of the many distinguished visitors to Sloane’s ever growing collections in 1735.

Sloane continued to support charitable endeavours and in 1739 helped to establish the Foundling Hospital, together with Handel, Hogarth, Sir Thomas Coram and other leading figures. This was a long overdue reaction to the appalling plight of abandoned children in London, which was exacerbated by the ‘Gin craze’ of the 1720s and 1730s.

In his eighties, Sloane published An Account of a Medicine for Soreness, Weakness and other Distempers of the eyes (1745), but it was now his Collections that were drawing the greatest attention and these were described by the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1748.

Sloane died in 1753 after a prolonged illness and was buried at Chelsea Old Church. By the terms of his will, Sloane's Museum and Library were offered for sale to the nation for £20,000, in the hope that they would form the cornerstone of a national library and natural history museum. By that time it comprised some 71,000 objects, over 50,000 books, a herbarium and 23,000 coins and medals. On the 7th June, the Act of Parliament (26 Geo II, cap 22) is given Royal Assent, fulfilling Sloane's wish. The act also enabled the purchase of the Harleian Collection for £10,000, and these collections are brought together with the Cottonian Library to form the basis of what are now known as the British Library, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.

His Manuscript Collection

The Sloane Manuscript collection is one of the great foundational collections of the British Library and runs to over 4,000 manuscripts on all manner of subjects from literature to mathematics, alchemy to medicine, and from travel journals to bundles of correspondence. There is also material on art, law, horology, theology and zoology.

The idea that we should film this collection was first proposed by the late Roy Porter who described it as an unparalleled resource for the study of early science and medicine; for the study of London and Britain’s maritime reach; and for the study of institutions from the company of adventurers, to glass-makers; and from the Royal Society, to schools for orphans.

It was never going to be practical to film the entire collection in a single numerical sequence, so we chose to divide it into thematic clusters covering:

  • Science and Society, 1660-1773 (Part 1)
  • Voyages of Discovery, 1492-1750 (Parts 2 & 3)
  • Alchemy, Chemistry, Magic and the Occult (Parts 4 & 5)
  • The History of Medicine, Surgery and Anatomy (Parts 6, 7 & 8)
  • Foundations of Botany, Zoology and Natural History (Part 9)

So far, in Parts 1 through 5, and in our East Meets West (Kaempfer) and Renaissance Man (John Dee) projects, we have managed to cover 390 manuscripts. Parts 6, 7 & 8 add a further 280 manuscripts.

The History of Medicine, Surgery and Anatomy

Given the nature of his profession, his own personal interests and his contacts, it should come as no surprise that materials relating to Medicine loom large in his collection.

Following a thorough survey of the collection we first drew up a shortlist of c1,200 manuscripts to select from. Based on advice from scholars, we have selected material in seven major categories:

(1) Works of classic authors such as Aesculapeius, Arderne, Aristotle, Dioscorides, Galen, Geber, William Harvey, Hippocrates, Paracelsus and others that are fundamental to any understanding of the History of Medicine. These enable us to trace the evolution of medical practice from 460 BC through to the 17th century. There is a 14th century copy of Arderne’s Liber Medicinarum, contemporaneous copies of works by Parcelsus and, in the case of Harvey, we include the holograph manuscript of his Praelectiones anatomiae universalis, in which he describes his discovery of the circulation of blood throughout the body.

(2) Works on Anatomy, ranging from 13th accounts of Physiognomy, and John Downe's Anatomical Observations of 1680-94, through to observations on Tyburn dissections in 1714.

(3) Papers of institutions such as the Royal College of Physicians, Bart’s, St Thomas’s, the Surgeons Company and the Society of Apothecaries. Many of these are records which Sloane retained, such as the Minutes of Committees of the RCP, 1681-97, and are absent from the archives of the institutions themselves.

(4) Important collections of medical lectures recorded by either the speakers or those attending. These include holograph copies of the lectures delivered to the College of Physicians by Francis Glisson, and contemporary copies of lectures delivered in Leiden by Herman Boerhaave (generally regarded as the founder of clinical teaching and of the modern academic hospital).

(5) Nearly 70 volumes of Medical Consilia and case-books describing medical practice, with examples from doctors working in London, Cambridge, Paris, Padua, Poitou and Venice. These range from the detailed notes of local physicians to the records of Sir Edmund King, Physician to Charles II, and Jean la Riviere, Physician to Henri IV. There are also accounts of Sloane’s own practice and a manuscript autobiography by Ephraim Skinner, MD, 1616-1661.


(6) Thirty volumes concerning the Plague dating from the 15th to the 17th centuries. There are numerous texts by John de Bordeaux and William Boghurst’s account of the Plague of London, 1666.


(7) Numerous miscellaneous works containing important sources for the History of Medicine such as commonplace books, medical receipt (or recipe) books and collections of manuscript tracts. These cover all manner of subjects including diet, the diseases of women, smallpox inoculation and childbirth.

This will be an indispensable collection for any library supporting the study of the History of Medicine. Sloane was uniquely positioned to acquire important works in this area and his is one of the finest collections in the world for this subject.

Further Reading

On the web:

The Sloane Herbarium online

Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum

In print:

  • S Ayscough, A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the British Museum
    (London, 1782).
  • The British Museum Quarterly vol.18 (1953) and the British Library Journal 14, no. 1 (1988)
    are devoted to Hans Sloane and his collections.
  • Gavin R de Beer, Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum
    (London, 1953).
  • Arthur MacGregor (ed), Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, scientist, antiquary
    (London, 1994)
  • William Munk, Roll of the College of Physicians, 2nd ed., i. 466
    (London, 1878).
  • E J L Scott, Index to the Sloane Manuscripts in the British Museum
    (London, 1904).
  • E St John Brooks, Sir Hans Sloane: The Great Collector and his Circle
    (London, 1954)
  • Charles R Weld, History of the Royal Society, i. 450
    (London, 1848).

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