[benbreen]

I agree, he's a very interesting figure. I was going to add that he invented or at least popularized hot chocolate, but after looking into it a bit more it turns out that the story is more complicated than I thought. Here's the official narrative I'd heard (via the Natural History Museum):

"While in Jamaica, Sloane was introduced to cocoa as a drink favoured by the local people. He found it 'nauseous' but by mixing it with milk made it more palatable. He brought this chocolate recipe back to England where it was manufactured and at first sold by apothecaries as a medicine.

Eventually, in the nineteenth century, it was being taken up by Messrs Cadbury who manufactured chocolate using Sloane's recipe."

But this post from the Sloane Letters blog argues that it's basically a myth (although it seems more accurate to say that the evidence is circumstantial at best and that we don't really know what his role was, if any, in the 18th century chocolate recipe that bore his name):

http://www.sloaneletters.com/sloane-the-chocolatier/