Healing Histories

McMillan collaborated in this team based project with pupils from Holy Trinity Primary School in Camden to explore the life of the Irish born 17th and 18th century royal physician, collector and botanist Sir Hans Sloane. His collection of 71,000 artefacts and plants from British colonies formed the foundation of the British Museum. For instance, cocoa that Sloane brought from Jamaica, was eventually used to create various chocolate products.

Moreover, amongst the 800 other plants that he collected from the Jamaica, now held in London’s Natural History Museum, were some used by enslaved and freed Africans, like the Maroons, along with animals and objects in healing and spiritual practices such as Obeah and Myal.

Sloane’s collection raises questions about the notion of western scientific objects with an alternative knowledge of how the natural world was used historically and what it meant to different communities. This has implications for our understanding of ecology in the natural environment today.

During the process, McMillan led creative writing and other activity based workshops with the Healing Histories team. Through historical research, he wrote the text for the pamphlet that used Sloane’s voice to take readers on a journey in a day of his life in and around Bloomsbury Square, where he lived where he gave free medical surgeries to poor residents living in nearby St Giles.  

The printed A3 folded pamphlet was shared with members of public who visited saw a text panel that erected in Bloomsbury Square in 2012.