As a youth Sloane collected objects of natural history and other curiosities. This led him to the study of medicine, which he went to London, where he studied botany, materia medica, surgery and pharmacy. His collecting habits made him useful to John Ray and Robert Boyle. After four years in London he travelled through France, spending some time at Paris and Montpellier, and stayed long enough at the University of Orange-Nassau to take his MD degree there in 1683. He returned to London with a considerable collection of plants and other curiosities, of which the former were sent to Ray and utilised by him for his History of Plants.

In 1687 Sloane became a fellow of the College of Physicians, and the same year went to Jamaica aboard HMS Assistance as physician in the suite of the new Governor of Jamaica, the second Duke of Albemarle.Jamaica was fast emerging as a source of immense profit to British merchants based on the cultivation of sugar and other crops by the forced labor of West Africans—many from the Akan and other peoples of the regions which the English entitled the Gold and Slave Coasts. Income from the sugar produced by enslaved African laborers on Sloane's wife's plantations at an area known as Sixteen Mile Walk fed the family fortunes in London and, together with Sloane's medical revenue and London property investments, gave him the wealth to collect on a vast scale. On his death Sloane bequeathed his collections to the English nation, founding the British Museum. (adapted from the Wikipedia article on Hans Sloane, 03-2018).

Digital facsimile from Biodiversity Heritage Library at this link.