Date of honorary Fellowship admission: 4 October 1705
Hans Sloane, 1st Baronet, was born in County Down in 1660. He moved to London in the 1680s to study chemistry, anatomy, physic and botany, before obtaining his MD at the University of Orange in 1683. In 1687 Sloane went to Jamaica with its governor, the second duke of Albemarle, to act as his personal physician. During this time he amassed a large natural history collection. He returned to London in 1689, where he set up a private medical practice. He also married Elizabeth Langley Rose, widow of Falke Rose and inheritor of Rose’s fortune, which came from sugar plantations in Jamaica. Sloane used this income to expand his collections, which numbered around 71,000 items. He bequeathed the collections to Great Britain, on the condition that anyone be allowed to see them, which led to the foundation of the British Museum and the British Library. He died in Chelsea in 1753.
