Background

Hume was born in Frankfort, Kentucky on 26 December 1889 the son of Dr Enoch Edgar Hume and his wife, Mary Ellen S.

Education

He attended Centre College, Danville, Ky. , from which he received the B. A. in 1908 and the M. A. in 1909. He then studied medicine at Johns Hopkins University, where he was awarded the M. D. in 1913, and served for a year on the staff of the Johns Hopkins Hospital as a voluntary assistant in neurology.

While in charge of the army's medical laboratory at Fort Banks, Massachussets, 1920-1922, Hume studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University, taking master's degrees in public health and tropical medicine. Further work at the School of Hygiene and Public Health of Johns Hopkins University brought him a doctorate in public health in 1924. His dissertation, an account of Max von Pettenkofer's work on cholera and other intestinal diseases, led him to write a biography of Pettenkofer (1929).

Career

Hume began his career in international medical and public health service as medical director of the American Relief Expedition to Italy after the 1915 earthquake. In 1916 he joined the Medical Reserve Corps of the United States Army with the rank of first lieutenant and was sent to the Army Medical School at Washington, D. C. , from which he graduated at the head of his class in 1917. Enlisting in the regular army that same year, Hume was assigned to the Division of Sanitation in the office of Surgeon General William C. Gorgas.

When the United States entered World War I, Hume was ordered to Italy as commander of an American army hospital near Asolo. Hearing that Italian and American soldiers wounded during the battle of Vittorio Veneto desperately needed surgical treatment, he organized several surgical teams and directed them in the field. At one stage of the fighting, when his post had to be abandoned under fire and he was wounded, he refused to be moved until all the other wounded at his post had been evacuated. For this gallantry he was awarded the Silver Star.

Hume also served with the British Expeditionary Force in the Meuse-Argonne offensive at St. -Mihiel, where he again was wounded. After the armistice, as chief medical officer and later as director of the American Red Cross mission to Serbia, he organized and operated a sanitary service – reorganizing hospitals, dispensaries, and dressing stations for soldiers and civilians – and combated an epidemic of typhus that is said to have caused the death of 80 percent of the Serbian physicians. For these achievements he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. He also directed the care of refugees in the Baltic countries.

Rising to the rank of colonel, Hume held various army appointments, including the assistant librarianship (1922 - 1926) of the Army (now National) Medical Library and editorship of the fourth series of its Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office. He rose to the rank of colonel. In 1932 he returned there for four years as librarian. From 1936 to 1943 he directed the army's Medical Field Service School at Carlisle Barracks, Pa. During World War II, Hume served on General Dwight D. Eisenhower's staff as adviser on military sanitation. He assisted in planning the invasions of Sicily and the Italian mainland, and was in the field in Africa, Sicily, and Italy (where he was wounded). From 1943 to 1945, as chief of the Allied government of the region occupied by the Fifth Army, he reestablished the city governments of Modena, Milan, Turin, and Genoa. For this work he received the Army's Legion of Merit.

As resourceful in dealing with displaced and discontented people as with casualties, Hume won another citation for his ingeniously tactful handling of a belligerent force of 3, 500 heavily armed Italian patriots in Bologna after that city fell to the Allies. With great finesse he organized a colorful public ceremony to disarm the belligerent partisans, while officially recognizing their contributions to the Allied cause. At Naples, through energetic and skillful action, he cut short a potentially disastrous epidemic of typhus. Hume was promoted to brigadier general in 1948 and to major general in 1949, when he became chief surgeon of the Far East Command and, in 1950, also of the United Nations forces in Korea. He retired from active service on December 31, 1951.

Hume was deeply interested in history, particularly the history of medicine and of military affairs. As a young officer he lectured at the University of Kansas and at Georgetown University. A prolific writer, Hume published a dozen books, including, besides the biography of Pettenkofer, The Medical Work of the Knights Hospitallers (1930), a biography of John Shaw Billings (1938), Ornithologists of the United States Army Medical Corps (1942), and The Medals of the United States Army Medical Department (1942). His journal articles, numbering more than 450, include 165 book reviews for Military Surgeon; a dozen articles on military medicine translated from French, German, Spanish, and Italian journals; and original papers on medical problems of the two world wars, army medals and honors, the history of the Army Medical Corps, the Society of the Cincinnati, and the lives of army medical officers. He contributed twelve articles to the Dictionary of American Biography. Hume's worldwide contacts and personal charm brought him numerous honors, both military and academic. In his entry in Who's Who in America he stated that he believed himself to be the most decorated soldier in United States history: he was entitled to wear medals from forty-three foreign countries and twenty-three United States Army decorations. Hume died in Washington, D. C.

Achievements

• He is remembered as a highly senior army surgeon and as an amateur ornithologist. In 1948 he was the recipient of the Gorgas Medal.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Memorial to George Hume, Esquire, Crown Surveyor of Virginia and Washington's Teacher of Surveying.

    (Facsimile Reprint of the classic book Memorial to George ...)

  • Medical Work Of The Knights Hospitallers Of Saint John Of Jerusalem

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • A Colonial Scottish Jacobite Family: The Establishment In Virginia Of A Branch Of The Humes Of Wedderburn

    (Illustrated By Letters And Other Contemporary Documents.)

  • Max Von Pettenkofer: His Theory Of The Etiology Of Cholera, Typhoid Fever And Other Intestinal Diseases

    (A Review Of His Arguments And Evidence.)

Membership

He was an active member of the Society of the Cincinnati and at one time was its president general.

Connections

In 1918 he married Mary Swigert Hendrick; they had one son.

Father:

Dr Enoch Edgar Hume

Mother:

Mary Ellen South

Spouse:

Mary Swigert Hendrick Hume

1889–1942

References

• Major General Edgar Erskine Hume: A biographical sketch