Thomas Guy sold his South Sea stock at the top of the 1720 bubble and left the profit to found Guy's Hospital

Thomas Guy opened a bookshop in Lombard Street in 1668. From 1679 he printed Bibles under licence from Oxford University. He sat as MP for Tamworth and became a governor of St Thomas' Hospital in 1704. In 1711 seamen's pay tickets he had bought were converted into South Sea Company stock. The company held the Asiento contract from 1713 and shipped enslaved Africans to Spanish America. While Guy held shares, 15,901 people were embarked on its ships and 12,864 landed. In 1720 Guy sold at the top of the market, before the bubble burst. In 1721 he began building a hospital for incurables. He died unmarried on 27 December 1724. His will gave the hospital £219,499, the largest charitable bequest in early 18th-century Britain. About £75,000 went to cousins, friends and distant relatives. Parliament incorporated his executors in March 1725. In 1728 the pamphleteer John Dunton accused him of giving only at death. A statue of Guy went up in the hospital courtyard in 1734. After the 2020 protests the Guy's and St Thomas' Foundation commissioned a study of his South Sea holdings and put the statue behind hoarding for two years. In 2022 the hoarding came down and panels about the slave trade were added. The statue stands.