But this being the proper notice of reference 2, a handsomely produced book from Belknap, first noticed at reference 1. A handsomely produced hardback which almost stays open at your page. A much better standard of book production than one is likely to get these days from a UK publisher.
A book which is fairly described by its title, being the story of a doctor from Ulster, who spent some serious time in Jamaica both doctoring and collecting, who came home, married well (money from Jamaica plantations), became a successful society doctor, became a successful collector (mainly by correspondence), and who died very old, rich and famous, leaving his collections to the nation. The nation eventually accepted them and built what became the British Museum to house them.
His success did make him some enemies, and some of his contemporaries sneered at his relatively humble origins and his lack of a proper university education (his medical qualification came from the south of France) - but he must have had considerable gifts of the gab, for friends and for society. He managed, for example, to succeed Sir Isaac Newton as President of the Royal Society.
I offer a few more snippets.
He was also, for a time, President of the Royal Society of Physicians. He was closely associated with Society of Apothecaries, ensuring the continuing existence of the Physic Garden at Chelsea by buying the land on which it stood and leasing it back to the Society for a nominal rent. He was also mixed up with the promotion of inoculation against smallpox, promotion which included experiment upon six condemned criminals. Slavers were early adopters, being keen to reduce slave mortality in transit. With Jenner (to whom BH has a family connection) coming along a bit later and moving on to inoculation with cowpox, rather safer than inoculation with smallpox. Closer to my own interests, Sloane was also an early adopter of political arithmetic for public medical purposes, an arithmetic which subsequently became known as statistics (in which the 'stat' bit stands for state).
It seems that many of the botanical specimens in the collections, while carefully & expensively prepared & packaged at the time of collection, have sat in cabinets & cupboards ever since, not attracting the attentions of serious botanists. But I suppose that is going to be the fate of any large scale collecting activity - at least until computers made it possible to use such collections without having to go to the bother of actually looking at them.
Collecting plants might not have resulted in grand global theories, like that of the roughly contemporary theory of gravity, at least not until Darwin came along more than a century later, but the theory of gravity did require collecting of a different sort, with many mariners & others being commissioned to collect astronomical data to feed the theoretical inquiries. And I dare say there were plenty of gentleman amateurs collecting astronomical facts which they carefully recorded in ledgers, since unread. Just as the cabinets of the gentlemen botanists.
While Sloane left his collections to the Nation, he did not leave enough money to endow both his two daughters and the new Museum. The necessary funds - £95,194 8s 2d - were raised by means of a lottery, a lottery which caused some scandal at the time.
When the British Museum was eventually opened, there was a presumption that it was open to all decent people, and there was some tension between the gentlemen scientists who expected to have the place to themselves and the common people who wanted to gawp at curiosities. Royals, nobles and rich people who wanted to gawp were presumably OK, being respectable sources of patronage and funds. Delbourgo turns up a snippet about one of the Museum's maids (whatever their proper functions might have been) trying to stop one Mrs. Ambrose Hankin from picking a pear from the Museum garden, with a rather forthright exchange following. There was a footnote purporting to tell one where this snippet came from, which I did not follow it up. But it did strike me that someone had had to do a lot of work in libraries to turn such things up. Perhaps Delbourgo made use of secondary - or even tertiary - sources rather than do this sort of work himself. With a link to reference 3 being that Robert Darnton, famous for diving into all kinds of libraries of this sort, whom I first came across as the author of 'The Great Cat Massacre', was a founding member of the DPLA council.
All in all, a good read.
PS: not to be confused with Sir John Soane, another collector, who was born the year that Sir Hans died.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/an-interesting-person.html.
Reference 2: Collecting the world: Hans Sloane and the origins of the British Museum - James Delbourgo - 2017.
Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/music-identification.html.
Reference 4: A voyage to the islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica : with the natural history of the herbs and trees, four-footed beasts, fishes, birds, insects, reptiles, &c. of the last of those islands; to which is prefix'd, an introduction, wherein is an account of the inhabitants, air, waters, diseases, trade, &c. of that place, with some relations concerning the neighbouring continent, and islands of America. Illustrated with figures of the things described, which have not been heretofore engraved. In large copper-plates as big as the life - Sir Hans Sloane - 1707-1725. His magnum opus. With thanks to the DPLA and Universidad Complutense de Madrid for the picture of the cover.
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