February 28, 2018
James Delbourgo

In 1759, London’s British Museum opened its doors for the first time, the first free national public museum in the world. In this Phi Beta Kappa Lecture at Medical Center Hour, historian James Delbourgo explores the role of slavery and imperialism in making this now venerable institution possible by exploring the career of its founder, Anglo-Irish physician Sir Hans Sloane. Sloane worked in Jamaica as a plantation doctor, used money from sugar plantations in the caribbean and from the Atlantic slave trade to support his collecting, and created his own personal imperial network to assemble one of the greatest cabinets of curiosities in the world—and one of the key institutional legacies of the Enlightenment.

Co-presented with Phi Beta Kappa (Beta of Virginia), President's Commission on Slavery and the University, Department of History, and History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library