Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/390

 Rushworth's Tryal of Strafford, p. 774; Pepys's Diary, ed. Wheatley, ii. 124; Hist. MSS. Comm. 11th Rep. App. vii. 40.]

SLOANE, HANS (1660–1753), physician, was the seventh son of Alexander Sloane, receiver-general of taxes, and his wife Sarah, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Hicks, chaplain to Archbishop Laud. He was born at Killileagh or White's Castle, co. Down, on 16 April 1660. At the age of sixteen he had hæmoptysis, and was in bad health for three years. This led to his giving up wine and ale, and being very temperate throughout life. He studied medicine at Paris and Montpelier, and at Montpelier, where he met his future friend, William Courten [q. v.], learned botany under Pierre Magnol and Tournefort. He graduated M.D. at the university of Orange in July 1683. He had known Robert Boyle and John Ray before he went to France, and visited them on his return in 1684. On 21 Jan. 1685 he was elected F.R.S., for which he was proposed by [q. v.] He met and liked [q. v.], and went to live in his house. On 12 April 1687, under the charter of James II, he was admitted fellow of the College of Physicians. In the same year he went to the West Indies as physician to the Duke of Albemarle, governor of Jamaica, and stayed there fifteen months, making many natural history observations and collections. He arrived in London on 29 May 1689 with eight hundred species of plants, settled in practice in Bloomsbury Square, and was rapidly successful. On 30 Nov. 1693 he was elected secretary of the Royal Society, and held office till 1712. He revived the publication of the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ which had been suspended since 1687. He was one of the original subscribers, in December 1696, to the dispensary of the College of Physicians (, Dispensary, viii.). In the same year he published ‘Catalogus Plantarum quæ in Insula Jamaica sponte proveniunt aut vulgo coluntur’ (London, 1696, 12mo), a work still esteemed by botanists. In it he followed the arrangement of John Ray, who addressed him as ‘the best of friends’ in a touching farewell letter dated 7 Jan. 1704 (see Letters of Eminent Lit. Men, Camden Soc., pp. 194, 206, 303). He was created M.D. at Oxford on 19 July 1701, and in 1707 published the first volume of his great natural history book, ‘A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbadoes, Nieves, St. Christopher's, and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the last’ (London, folio), which he dedicated to Queen Anne. The second volume appeared in 1725. The publication of the first added so much to his reputation that in 1708 he was elected a foreign member of the French Academy of Sciences, and shortly afterwards a member of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg, and of the Royal Academy of Madrid. He was elected a censor of the College of Physicians in 1705, 1709, and 1715, and was president from 1719 to 1735.

On the death of Sir Isaac Newton in 1727, Sloane was chosen president of the Royal Society, and held office till November 1741. He contributed several papers to the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ (vols. xvii. to xlx.). His practice became very large, and the chief people of the time were his patients. Queen Anne consulted him, and one of his notes shows that it took him about four hours to drive down to Windsor in his coach-and-four. He advised in her last illness that she should be bled. He supported inoculation, and inoculated members of the royal family. He was a whig, and in August 1722 was appointed physician-general to the army on the death of Sir Thomas Gibson (Sloane MS. 4046, f. 273). On 3 April 1716 he was made a baronet, and in 1727 first physician to George II. A physician then had charge of Christ's Hospital, and he was appointed to this post in 1694, and held office till 1730. He used to give his whole salary to the foundation, and was a generous benefactor to many other hospitals. Among his papers are innumerable appeals for help, pecuniary or professional, and it is clear that he was rarely asked in vain. He never refused to advise a patient who could not afford to pay him a fee. Once a week he had an open dinner party, at which he entertained his friends in the College of Physicians and the Royal Society. In 1732 he was one of the promoters of the colony of Georgia.

In 1712 Sloane had purchased the manor of Chelsea, and, on retiring from practice as a physician in May 1741, settled on his estate there. He had founded in 1721, for the Society of Apothecaries, the botanic garden at Chelsea, which is still owned by the Apothecaries, but he devised it, in the event of their ceasing to cultivate it, to the College of Physicians and the Royal Society jointly. In 1745 he issued his only medical publication, ‘An Account of a Medicine for Soreness, Weakness, and other Distempers of the Eyes’ (London, 8vo; 2nd edit. 1750; French transl. Paris, 1746). After an illness of only three days, Sloane died on 11 Jan. 1753, and was buried, with his wife, in Chelsea churchyard; the monument, designed by [q. v.], still attracts passers-by. He married, in 1695, Elizabeth (d. 1724), daughter of John Langley, a London alderman, and widow of Fulk Rose of 