Today a curious collection became a national treasure.
Hans Sloane was born in Ireland in 1660, about the same time as the European Enlightenment began. Generations of explorers and thinkers would emerge with a conviction that collecting things was the way to discern patterns, form, and purpose in the natural world. Sloane was no exception, collecting whatever objects prompted his curiosity when he was only a child and, as a student of medicine, gathering and cataloging plants that would be used for textbooks after his graduation. Another quality of the Enlightenment was colonization, as Europeans found it a lucrative tool for building and funding their intellectual and more mercenary proclivities. Again, Sloane was in the middle of it, going off to Jamaica in 1867, where he discovered 800 new species of plants and pocketed whatever objects captured his fancy. He also discovered a bitter pick-me-up leaf called cocoa which he thought was nauseating, but mixed it with milk and gave the world chocolate.
His contemporaries aggressively collected things from any and everywhere British ships put to port, whether as traders or warriors. These were the days before anybody questioned who owned artifacts, when the more powerful had final say on who got what, which usually meant that objects of value, whether financial or simply curiously so, ended up back in the UK. This would go on for another century or two but was already well under way in the 1700s. Sloane, with his traveling days over (he was president of the Royal College of Physicians, president of the Royal Society, and first physician to King George II), used his wealth to buy the curiosities that others had compiled into “cabinets” and filled his Chelsea home with them. When he died in 1753, he left his massive collection to the public and, on this day six years later, the British Museum was opened to the public,.
Discovery and insight used to be limited by what people could physically find and collect (and often steal), but they nevertheless managed to figure out quite a lot.
