Does the British public, or even the medical profession, fully realize that the nation owes that magnificent institution, the British Museum, to the liberality of a doctor? Its true begetter was Sir Hans Sloane, a fashionable physician of the eighteenth century.... Hans Sloane, who was of Scottish descent, was born in County Down in 1660. Even in boyhood he collected specimens, and the taste grew upon him till it became the ruling passion of his life. Natural history led him to medicine, which in those spacious days comprehended all science within itself.... With a rapidity that seems enviable to us whose professional lot lies in more arduous times, Sloane was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1685, and was admitted to the Fellowship of the College of Physicians in 1687. In that year there came to him an offer to go to Jamaica as physician to the Duke of Albemarle, who had been appointed Governor of that island.... Within eighteen months the Duke died, and his physician's nominal occupation was gone. Sloane's real occupation, however, had been the gathering of materials for the museum which was his lifework. He returned to England in 1689, loaded with the spoils of his expeditions... and became a highly prosperous physician. The Court and the aristocracy, we are told, had the “greatest confidence in his prescriptions.” Queen Anne took counsel of him; George the Second made him the keeper of the royal constitution; George the First had previously made him a baronet and appointed him Physician-General to the Army. The University of Oxford gave him its doctor's degree in 1701, and he was President of the College of Physicians for sixteen years. He was appointed Secretary of the Royal Society in 1693, and succeeded Isaac Newton in the Presidency of that body in 1727.... Throughout his life Sloane went on adding to his museum, and he accumulated a vast collection, which included books, manuscripts, pictures, medals, and coins, as well as objects of natural history. He retired from practice in 1721, and died in 1753 at the age of 93 leaving in his will directions that his museum, which was valued at £50,000, should be offered to the nation for the sum of £20,000. The offer was accepted by Parliament, and the collection formed the nucleus of the British Museum, which was opened to the public in 1759. During the greater part of his professional life Sloane lived in Bloomsbury Square, close to the site of the future British Museum. Towards the end of his life he retired to Chelsea, where be had purchased a manor house and land, which is now covered by the stately mansions of the Cadogan estate. One of his daughters became the wife of the second Lord Cadogan, and the physician's own name is perpetuated in Sloane Street and Hans Place. If Sloane was wealthy, he was also liberal. He gave the Apothecaries' Society their famous Physic Garden at Chelsea; he took part in the establishment of the Foundling Hospital, and he was never deaf to any deserving appeal made in the name of charity.
(BMJ 1905;ii: 1225)