Talk:David Hummel

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Page scope

David Hummel is a biography of the Swedish physician David Hummel (born 1893), doctor to Sven Hedin's Sino-Swedish Expedition and collector of herbarium specimens. Its specimen table lists the accession pages whose collector field resolves to this page through the redirect D. Hummel, the form printed on his labels. An earlier David Hummel, author of papers on Swedish bedrock and of map-sheet descriptions published in Stockholm in the 1860s and 1870s, is a different person.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, label readings and unresolved identifications here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources read

• Vem är det (Project Runeberg page scans with OCR): his entries in the editions of 1945 (p. 506), 1953, 1957, 1963, 1967, 1969, 1977 and 1981 (p. 476) were read. No entry was found in the editions of 1933, 1939 or 1943. The article cites 1945 for his birth, parents, schooling and hospital posts, and 1981 for his later career.
• Sven Hedin, History of the Expedition in Asia, 1927–1935 (three parts, Stockholm 1943–1944), read through the Digital Silk Road full-text search of the Toyo Bunko copy. That search returns short OCR passages around each hit, not whole pages, and the page numbers come from its page index. Every passage the article uses was read in that form. Part II's title page is read by the OCR as "Publication 26"; its half-title and the Toyo Bunko catalogue give Publication 24.
• Einar Lönnberg in Fauna och flora (1931), p. 145, for the reptiles, amphibians and fish he gave to the Riksmuseum.
• Herbarium catalogues: the Swedish Museum of Natural History's own catalogue for S-GH-1666, and GBIF for the six cannabis sheets, the Berlin and Melbourne duplicates and the overall count of specimens (October 2026).

• Later life': the Stockholm burial register (Hitta graven) for his death and burial; the National Archives of Sweden's catalogue (through its open-data service) for his papers; the Trondheim newspaper Nidaros of 27 November 1946, p. 3, read in the National Library of Norway's OCR, for the Order of St Olav; the Museum of Ethnography's collection database for the objects he collected.

Source conflicts

• Years with the expedition. Vem är det (1945, 1981) gives 1927–30 and 1933–34. Hedin's lists of members name him for 1927–28 in Part I, for 1928–31 in Part II and for 1933–34 in Part III. The title of his own 1983 article reads 1927–31. The article states 1927 and 1933–34 and gives no end year for the first period.
• The Linnaeus medal. Vem är det (1945) dates the Academy of Sciences' Linnaeus medal in gold to 1930. Hedin reports it in his chapter on 1931 (Part II, p. 178), without a date. The article gives 1930.
• Name forms. Vem är det prints David Axelsson Hummel (1945–1957), David A:son Hummel (1963–1969) and David Åsön Hummel (1981). His labels and the Stockholm catalogue use D. Hummel; the Berlin herbarium has Hummel,D. and the Melbourne herbarium Hummel, D.A.

• India and the ship's-doctor years. Vem är det (1957–1981) dates the archaeological expedition to India to 1953 and his work as a ship's doctor to 1957–63. The Museum of Ethnography's record dates the India expedition, led by Hanna Rydh, to 1952–53 and his ship's-doctor voyages to North, South and Central America and the West Indies to 1956–58. The article follows Vem är det.
• Place of death. The burial register gives the date of death (2 January 1984) and the burial (1 February 1984, Norra begravningsplatsen, block 04A, grave 414) but no place of death. Swedish Wikipedia gives Lidingö, citing Sveriges dödbok, which was not consulted. The article states only that he later lived on Lidingö. The register also lists an earlier David Hummel buried in the same grave in 1892.

Other specimens under his name

The article's count (4,341 specimens) is GBIF's for the collector name "D. Hummel" in October 2026. GBIF holds more under other forms of the name: 427 under "Hummel, D." (343 of them at Kew and 65 in Paris, mostly from China and dated 1927–1934) and 572 under "David Hummel" (357 at Stockholm and 193 at the Natural History Museum, London). These were not added to the article's figure.

Under "D. Hummel", 34 specimens are dated 1939 or later. They include plants from Rajputana and Kashmir dated 1953, a bumblebee from Gäddede dated 1949, and plants from Greece, Portugal, the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, New Orleans, the Cape and Ho Chi Minh City dated 1957–1962. Most of the 1957–1964 specimens under "David Hummel" come from Spain, Portugal and the Caribbean. These places and years match his work as doctor to the 1953 expedition to India, as provincial physician at Gäddede and as a ship's doctor, but the catalogue entries name the collector only, and the article does not attribute them to him. Two specimens carry dates that do not fit: an Allium from Kansu dated 1939 and a lichen from the Min Shan range in Kansu dated 1986.

Unconsulted works

• Hummel's own account, "Som läkare vid Hedinexpeditionen till Kina 1927–31", Nordisk medicinhistorisk årsbok 1983, pp. 155–164. Known from the Swedish national library catalogue; its text was not read.
• The "own report" with a map of his route that Hedin expected Hummel to publish (Part III, p. 345). No such report was found in the Swedish national library catalogue.
• The botanical reports of the expedition. A. H. Magnusson's lichen volumes and T. Norlindh's Flora of the Mongolian Steppe and Desert Areas (1949) cite gatherings of his, but were seen only as search snippets. No publication on his vascular plants from Xinjiang, and none citing his cannabis numbers, was found.
• A novel published in 2026, Anneli Jordahl's Kallet, is cited by the Swedish national library's authority record for his name. It is fiction and is not used here.

The war years

The article states only what the archive catalogue and the 1946 notice support. Other accounts were read and not used:

• Håkon Arntsen, "Svensk lege – norsk krigshelt", Vaajma no. 3 (2013), pp. 4–5, a cross-border local-history magazine. It describes a courier network he set up in Frostviken with contacts in Lierne and Røyrvik, help to refugees from Namdalen, escaped prisoners of war and German deserters, an arrest in May 1944 followed by release the same night, and a street in Namsos named Dokter Hummels veg. It gives no sources and dates his birth to 1882, against 1893 in Vem är det and the burial register.
• A Sveriges Radio Jämtland item of 14 June 2006 reports the naming of a street in Gäddede, Doktor Hummels väg. It was read in a browser but could not be saved, so it is not cited.
• Swedish Wikipedia's further claims (contact with Sonja Wigert, the Finnish Order of the White Rose, public-health work at Gäddede, the Frostviken local-history society of 1935) rest on sources that could not be reached or were not found.
• His papers in the Military Archives (SE/KrA/0035:0379, four volumes, 1927–1983) include, by the catalogue, a transcript of his own account of the Swedish–Norwegian links through Frostviken in 1941–45, files from the Henry Rinnan case of 1946–47, and the honours he received. They were not consulted. The National Archives also list him among the creators of the Hedin–Norin collection and hold the archive of the Gäddede district's provincial physician at Östersund.

Portrait

The lead image is the sheet of Hummel 679 (1928), CC BY 4.0. No portrait with a known licence has been found.

Notes compiled when the page was created, October 2026.