Anglo-French botanist, physician, and explorer. A descendant of Commodore John Weddell, who took Ormuz from the Portuguese in 1622, and a nephew of James Weddell, second admiral to James Clark Ross on his explorations of Antarctica, Hugh Algernon Weddell emigrated to France with his parents because of a family quarrel and was educated in Boulogne-sur-Mer and then in Paris at Coll⟨ge Henri IV. Passionately interested in botany and medicine, he studied them jointly, under the pharmacist Chomel at l'h⟴pital Cochin and Adrien de Jussieu at the Jardin des Plantes. In 1841, he qualified as a physician, and for his thesis wrote on the medical uses and qualities of the Urticeae family. The following year, aged 23, he was chosen by Jussieu as botanist on the Castelnau expedition to South America. But the collaboration between him and Castelnau was of short duration. In August 1845, Weddell left the party at Villamaria, Colombia, to concentrate exclusively on his botanical and medical research in the Andes, eventually returning to France in 1848 having discovered coca and cinchona among other plants, over 5,000 specimens in total, as well as bringing back many zoological and mineralogical specimens.
Within the official account of the Castlenau expedition, Weddell's contributions focus on his solo excursion through the region, which resulted in a two-volume flora of the Andes. He made a second trip to Bolivia in 1851. On his return to France, he settled down quietly to his medical practice and botanical research in Bagn⟨res-de-Bigorre, and later in Poitiers, until his death in 1877.
Weddell was the first to demonstrate scientifically the medical importance of coca, especially of its active alkaloid (which, however, he failed to isolate), as well as the dangers attached to its misuse. His work contributed to the cultivation of cinchona in the Dutch East Indies and other tropical regions, and earned him the Order of the Netherlands Lion in 1855, a rare distinction for a foreigner. His observations on the fossils of Tarija in Bolivia and on the different varieties of cinchona led him to elaborate, between 1850 and 1860, a theory of adaptation that anticipated Darwin, at least in France. His paper 'Sur ce qu'on Appelle Esp⟨ce en Botanique', a reprise of ideas first published in 1855 under the title 'Sur quelques ⟉corces Officinales' (Bull. Soc. Bot. Fr.), is concerned with the interaction between the physiology and physiognomy of plants and their environment.
Sources:
M.P. Bajon, 1995, "Une expedition méconnue en Amérique du Sud: la mission Castelnau", in Y. Laisssus (ed), Les Naturalistes Français en Amérique du Sud XVI-XIX siècles: 337-346.
