David Hummel

David Hummel
Hummel 679, labelled Cannabis, which Hummel gathered by the monastery of Fu-Shu-Shi in the Bogdo Ola on 1 August 1928 (Swedish Museum of Natural History, CC BY 4.0)
Born	13 July 1893 Ekeberga, Kronoberg County, Sweden
Died	2 January 1984
Nationality	Swedish
Occupation	Physician
Institutions	Sino-Swedish Expedition
Known for	Plant and animal collections of the Sino-Swedish Expedition
Collector name on accessions	D. Hummel

David Hummel (13 July 1893 – 2 January 1984) was a Swedish physician. He was doctor to Sven Hedin's Sino-Swedish Expedition in China from 1927 and again in 1933–34, and collected plants and animals on its journeys.^: XV The Swedish Museum of Natural History catalogues six of his herbarium sheets as Cannabis: five gathered in the Bogdo Ola (Bogda Shan) of Xinjiang in the summer of 1928 and one from a cultivated plant in southern Mongolia in 1927. From 1932 to 1956 he was provincial physician at Gäddede in Jämtland.

Training

Hummel was born at Ekeberga in Kronoberg County on 13 July 1893, the son of Axel Hummel, a director, and Atalia Lundberg. He passed the school-leaving examination at Djursholm in 1913 and took the licentiate in medicine at Stockholm in 1923. From 1923 to 1926 he held hospital posts at Sophiahemmet and in the medical ward of Sabbatsberg hospital, in the surgical ward of the garrison hospital in Stockholm, at the county hospital in Växjö and in the surgical ward of the children's hospital in Gothenburg. He returned to Sabbatsberg in 1931.

Physician to the expedition

Hummel reached Peking in 1927 as the expedition's physician, together with the geologist Erik Norin and Folke Bergman.^: 11 At the Peking Union Medical College, Paul Stevenson taught him and other members of the expedition anthropometric and craniological measurement.^: 12 On the march west in 1927 he kept his medicine chests, his herbarium and his jars of collected animals in a tent of his own, and treated patients, most of them Mongols, for skin diseases and trachoma. Hedin describes him getting down from his camel for every flower he saw, to add it to his herbarium.^{: 76, 99, 113}

Hedin named Norin, Bergman and Hummel as the only members of the staff besides himself who had followed the expedition "from the beginning practically to the end".^: XV He served as its doctor from 1927 and again in 1933–34. In 1930 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him its Linnaeus medal in gold for his botanical and zoological collections.^: 178

Ürümqi and the Bogdo Ola, 1928

In the spring of 1928 Hummel practised as a doctor in Ürümqi. On 2 April he was called to Liu, the brother-in-law of the governor of Xinjiang, Yang Zengxin; Liu had just been appointed governor of Aksu and was seriously ill.^{: 250: 1–2} The expedition kept meteorological stations in Ürümqi and in the Bogdo Ola.^: 1 On 20 April Hummel took over the station in the Bogdo Ola from Marschall and the student Liu, with his assistant and Russian teacher, Vorotnikov.^{: 247, 251}

Yang agreed to Hummel's request to travel to the Bogdo Ola for botanical and zoological study. Yang asked him to take soundings in "the little alpine lake near the temple Fo-shu-ssu" and to judge whether the climate there would suit his health. Hummel's time otherwise went on botanical excursions around the city, his patients and a growing practice.^: 2 His sheets from the Bogdo Ola that the museum catalogues as Cannabis are dated 7 June and 1, 19 and 31 August 1928.

After Yang was murdered in Ürümqi on 7 July 1928, Hummel was at the expedition's headquarters in the city.^{: 5, 202} In September Hedin sent a car to Ürümqi to fetch Hummel to Nils Ambolt, who was ill with dysentery. Hummel stayed with Ambolt at Chuguchaq and brought him to Ürümqi on 2 November.^{: 14–17, 27}

Later journeys, 1929–1934

In 1929 Hummel made a collecting journey of his own, for plants and animals.^: 93 It took him to the country of the Tebbu Tibetans on the border between Gansu and Tibet. He returned after nine months.^{: 157, 175: 345}

Hummel came out from Sweden to rejoin the expedition in 1933 and left Peking with Hedin on 21 October that year.^: 213: 1 In 1934 his task was to collect plants and animals, especially birds, and to prepare them.^: 137 Illness forced him to leave the expedition. In the summer of 1934 he returned to Sweden with Bergman.^{: 220, 302}

Collections

GBIF lists 4,341 specimens under the collector name D. Hummel. Of these, 4,304 are at the Swedish Museum of Natural History and 4,295 were collected in China. He gave collections of lizards, snakes, frogs and fish to the vertebrate department of the Riksmuseum, the Swedish Museum of Natural History. His insect collections were published at the expense of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, under the editorship of Yngve Sjöstedt.^: 59 The Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm lists 241 objects collected by him.

In 1983 Hummel published an account of his years as the expedition's doctor in the yearbook of the Museum of Medical History in Stockholm.

Cannabis specimens

The six sheets are labelled Expeditio centrali-asiatica sub duce D:ris Sven Hedin and bear the name D. Hummel. The 1927 sheet, number 1330 of 1 August, is a cultivated plant from Camp XI, labelled Mongolia australis (southern Mongolia). The museum places the site in Inner Mongolia. G. Samuelsson identified it as Cannabis sativa in 1931.

The other five are from the Bogdo Ola in 1928. Number 164 is from Ozun-ava, 7 June. Number 679 is from waste ground by the monastery of Fu-Shu-Shi, at about 1,900 m, 1 August. Number 874 is from a meadow in the upper Mou-choul-go valley, at about 1,300 m, 19 August, with the note cult. ? (cultivated?). Numbers 908 and 909 are from a meadow in the Losan-go valley, 31 August. The museum identifies these five to genus only, as Cannabis. Number 909 was determined as Cannabis by E. Emanuelsson in 2005. Duplicates of numbers 164, 908, 909 and 1330 are in the Berlin herbarium (B), and of number 909 in Melbourne (MEL).

Accessions collected by Hummel:

	Collected	Locality	Repository	Catalogue number
Hummel 1330 (1927)	1 August 1927	Tsachan tjollo Gol, Camp XI	Swedish Museum of Natural History	S-GH-1666
Hummel 164 (1928)	7 June 1928	Ozun-ava, Bogdo Ola	Swedish Museum of Natural History	S-GH-4806
Hummel 679 (1928)	1 August 1928	Fu-Shu-Shi monastery, Bogdo Ola	Swedish Museum of Natural History	S-GH-4809
Hummel 874 (1928)	19 August 1928	Upper valley of Mou-choul-go, Bogdo Ola	Swedish Museum of Natural History	S-GH-4810
Hummel 908 (1928)	31 August 1928	Losan-Go valley, Bogdo Ola	Swedish Museum of Natural History	S-GH-4807
Hummel 909 (1928)	31 August 1928	Losan-Go valley, Bogdo Ola	Swedish Museum of Natural History	S05-59

Later life

Hummel was provincial physician of the Gäddede district from 1932 to 1956. His papers in the Military Archives (Krigsarkivet) of the National Archives of Sweden document his work at Gäddede during the Second World War as a Swedish–Norwegian contact man and for the intelligence service of the Norwegian legation in Stockholm. In 1940 he acted as a border agent and as the legation's trusted man, mainly in refugee matters. In November 1946 he was among the Swedish citizens whom the King of Norway appointed to the Order of St Olav "for særlig framragende fortjenester av Norges sak under krigen" (for especially outstanding services to the cause of Norway during the war). He was made a Commander.

In 1953 he was doctor to a Swedish archaeological expedition to India. He was a ship's doctor from 1957 to 1963, and doctor to Norwegian whaling expeditions in the Southern Ocean in 1959, 1960 and 1962. He later lived on Lidingö. He died on 2 January 1984 and was buried at Norra begravningsplatsen.

See also

• Larionov 65 (1876)
• Trofimov s.n., Hotan (1940)