Educated at Eastbourne Ladies' College, Hume studied the natural sciences tripos at Newnham College, Cambridge, receiving a first class pass in Part II in 1910.

[1] She then received a Bathurst studentship to continue her studies, working at the Botany School on her first publications, including a paper engaging with the graft hybrid controversy which was the focus of William Bateson.

[5] In 1919 she joined the Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine in London, where she would remain until 1959.

For example, Hume conducted preliminary research in a foundling hospital in Vienna which contributed to Harriette Chick's proof that rickets was caused by deficiencies in diet rather than by microbes.

[8] Hume, Chick, and virologist Marjorie MacFarlane wrote a history of the Lister Institute which was published in 1971.