Women in the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base

© Dr Rosalind White & The Sloane Lab 2024

The Sloane Lab Knowledge Base (SLKB) is a powerful tool for uncovering the often-overlooked presence of women to Sir Hans Sloane’s extensive collections. These contributions illuminate the intricate and vital roles that women played in the scientific networks of the early modern period. 

The intention for this site is to make it easier for users to locate and engage with these narratives. 

Just as recent historiography has sought to ‘decentre Darwin’, recognising that his towering status in the history of science is, in part, a retrospective construction, so too have Sloane scholars sought to reassess Sloane’s legacy. His work was not the product of a lone genius, but rather the outcome of contributions from a broad and often overlooked array of individuals — women, children, servants, enslaved people, and indigenous communities — whose knowledge and labour were integral to the creation of his collections. 

The life cycle of the butterfly, from an album of 160 drawings entitled ‘Merian’s Drawings of European Insects &c’, by Maria Sibylla Merian, watercolour and bodycolour, on vellum, c. 1670-1682, (detail) © The Trustees of the British Museum. Photograph with magnifying glass taken by the author.

Despite societal norms and legal restrictions that limited their property rights, access to education, and professional recognition, many women still found ways to make significant contributions to Sloane’s collections. However, their presence is often challenging to uncover, obscured by the lack of full names and the limitations of contemporaneous documentation. The narratives of these women are seldom fully visible, and much of their involvement has been lost to history or underemphasised in traditional archival records. Yet, through careful sifting of historical documents, the stories of lesser-known women within Sloane’s collections begins to surface. 

The concept of ‘object biography’ — which considers specimens not merely as natural objects, but as cultural artefacts imbued with significant human histories — offers a particularly useful approach to uncovering the stories of these women. Curators like Miranda Lowe and Subhadra Das have highlighted how natural history specimens, in particular, are often approached from a decontextualised, ahistorical ‘hard science’ perspective, which overlooks the cultural and social dimensions of these collections.¹ Through this resource, I hope to bring these dimensions to the fore.

Occasionally, members of Sloane’s family make an appearance in his catalogues. Elizabeth Cadogan, Sloane’s daughter — referred to as ‘My Lady Cadogan’ — sent her father a piece of fasciated ash from Cansham. His Miscellanies catalogue also records shell work by a ‘Miss Stanley,’ likely the daughter of his eldest, Sarah Stanley (née Sloane), who had several children.

Grateful for Sloane’s medical expertise, former patients often expressed their appreciation by sending him rare and unusual specimens. Mary Herbert contributed a hairball taken from the maw of a cow, while Lady Sondes gifted him a gold snuff box, intricately engraved and featuring an enamelled picture of her late husband. Lady Garrard, who maintained a long-standing correspondence with Sloane, shared his fascination with the natural world; among her gifts were an insect found in a decayed apple tree branch⁴ and a horsehair discovered inside a duck’s egg. Lady Ferrers, suffering from a venereal disease contracted from her husband,⁵ sent Sloane the skeletons of various animals collected from the waters of Montperon, a site known for its peculiar ability to dissolve the flesh of submerged creatures within hours.

Another notable example is Lady Catherine Walpole, the wife of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, whose sixteen-year-old daughter fell gravely ill. As the family’s physician, Sloane advised she ‘take the waters’ in Bristol and consulted Dr. George Cheyne, a physician specialising in dietary problems and nervous diseases. Their daughter experienced a significant, albeit temporary recovery and Lady Walpole — herself a collector of shells and exotic birds — sent Sloane a ridge scale from a tortoise.

Slide

Portrait of Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, and Catherine Shorter, Lady Walpole, c.1754, by John Giles Eccardt. Note the shell-work in the glass bell-jar on the right. © The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. N.B. A high-quality facsimile of the painting and frame now hangs in the Blue Bedchamber at Strawberry Hill House.

For some of these women, it’s evident that Sloane was often the first port of call when they encountered curiosities or sought insight into natural phenomena. Katharine Byde sent him a ‘large flatt lump of the salt terrene substance’ found at the bottom of a hayrick in Ware Park, where the hay, not fully dried, had caught fire. Enclosed with the specimen was a letter asking Sloane to identify it and expressing her trust in his expertise to ‘unravel’ its mystery.⁶ Women’s rights advocate Mary Astell who personally viewed Sloane’s ‘noble repository’ on multiple occasions, likewise, gifted him ‘two metalline reguli said to be produc’d from an animal substance’, hoping he would determine whether its ‘kin’ was animal or mineral.⁷

While many women contributed to Sloane’s collections voluntarily and were recognised for their efforts, there are instances where the contributions of women were neither voluntary nor properly acknowledged. These examples highlight the more unscrupulous aspects of Sloane’s collecting practices and reflect the broader context of exploitation that often underpinned the acquisition of knowledge during this period.

The Humana category, for example, contains entries that suggest a woman’s body parts were collected posthumously and without her consent. These include the singed hair of a woman killed by lightning at Mounts Mill, ‘the hairy scalp of Mrs. Robinson murdered by Elton Lewis’ and a ‘woman’s breast after being buried years taken up’, given to Sloane by Mr. Walpole.

The collections include numerous items gathered under questionable circumstances, particularly within the framework of colonial exploitation. Collectors like Sloane often operated in systems that treated indigenous knowledge as resources to be extracted and appropriated with little regard for the people who provided it. The Herbaria are especially revealing, with many entries referencing unnamed local women from regions under colonial influence, including the Caribbean, West Africa, and East Asia.

This research was generously funded by University College London (UCL) through The Sloane Lab, one of five ‘Discovery Projects’ under the Towards a National Collection initiative, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

1. Das, Subhadra, and Miranda Lowe. ‘Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Interpreting Natural History’. Journal of Natural Science Collection, vol. 6, p. 4‐14. ↩︎
2. Don Saltero’s combined the social atmosphere of a coffee house with a curiosity museum, featuring items donated by Sir Hans Sloane, (Salter’s former employer). After her father’s death in 1728, May managed the coffee house for over 30 years, during which ten catalogues survived. Though contemporary sources credited her husband, recent scholarship recognises May as the true proprietor despite legal constraints of the time. See Brun, Katie. Contextualising Title Pages by Material Culture: Typography & List of Rarities A Case Study Don Saltero’s Coffeehouse Catalogues, 1729 – 1795. 2023. Durham University, Masters, http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/14925/. ↩︎
3. Burton, William. ‘V. Part of a Letter from William Burton, M. D. at Windsor, to C. Mortimer, R. S. Secr. Concerning the Viper-Catchers, and Their Remedy for the Bite of a Viper’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 39, no. 443, Jan. 1997, pp. 312–312. ↩︎
4. Cecilia (Stede) Garrard (d.1753) the wife of Sir Nicholas Garrard (1665-1727). Garrard, Cecilia. To Hans Sloane. 6 July 1731. British Library, Sloane MS 4053, f. 269. ↩︎
5. Mary Shirley, Countess Ferrers, (née Meredith), later Lady Frederick Campbell (c. 1730- 1807). Ferrers, Mary. To Hans Sloane. undated. British Library, Sloane MS 4058, fols. 327–33. ↩︎
6. Byde, Katherine. To Hans Sloane. British Library, Sloane MS 4058, fol. 98. ↩︎
7. Astell, Mary. To Hans Sloane. 2 July 1720. British Library, Sloane MS 4045, ff. 336-337.
   —. To Hans Sloane. 25 Apr. 1724. British Library, Sloane MS 4047, f. 163. Mary Astell (1666-1731). ↩︎