Charles Drew

Charles Drew: The Surgeon Who Banked Blood

In 1941 the United States Army and Navy told the man running the country's first blood bank that they would not accept blood from Black donors, and later that they would take it only if it were stored separately. The man in question, Charles Richard Drew, was the leading authority on blood preservation in the world, and he was Black. He resigned. There was no scientific basis for the policy and he said so.

Foggy Bottom to Amherst

Drew was born on 3 June 1904 in the Foggy Bottom neighbourhood of Washington, D.C., into a middle-class African American family. His father Richard laid carpets; his mother, Nora Burrell, was a trained teacher. As a boy he delivered over a thousand newspapers a day.

He went to Dunbar High School, the Washington institution then celebrated for the opportunities it offered Black students, and graduated in 1922. An athletics scholarship took him to Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he played football and ran track, finishing in 1926. Medical school cost money he did not have, so from 1926 to 1928 he taught chemistry and biology at Morgan College in Baltimore, serving simultaneously as its first athletic director and its football coach.

McGill, and John Beattie

He chose McGill University in Montreal over Howard and Harvard for a practical reason: it would let him start without a delay for prerequisites. It also gave him the mentor who set the direction of his life. John Beattie, at McGill, was working on blood transfusion and the treatment of shock, and Drew took up the problem with him.

He was very good. He was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha honour society and finished second in a graduating class of 127, taking his Doctor of Medicine and Master of Surgery in 1933. His first faculty post was as an instructor in pathology at Howard University from 1935, and then in surgery at Freedmen's Hospital, the federally run teaching hospital attached to Howard.

In 1938 a two-year Rockefeller fellowship took him to Columbia. There, working at Presbyterian Hospital with John Scudder, he attacked the central obstacle in transfusion medicine: whole blood spoils within days, which makes it nearly useless for a battlefield or a mass casualty event. Drew's answer was to separate the liquid plasma from the cells — de-liquification — which extended usable storage by roughly two months, after which the plasma could be reconstituted to its original state. Plasma also travelled and stored far more readily than whole blood, which is what made it a battlefield product.

His thesis, "Banked Blood: A Study on Blood Preservation," earned him a doctorate of science in surgery from Columbia in 1940. He was the first African American in the United States to hold that degree.

Blood for Britain

The timing could not have been sharper. Britain was under bombardment and desperate for plasma. In late 1940 Scudder recruited Drew to organise the effort, and as medical director of the Blood for Britain project he built the logistics of modern blood banking more or less from scratch: centralised collection sites, mandatory testing of every batch before shipment, trained personnel, and a contamination-control regime using centrifugation, liquid extraction, ultraviolet light and Merthiolate. In five months the programme drew blood from nearly 15,000 donors and shipped over 5,500 vials of plasma across the Atlantic. The Blood Transfusion Betterment Association commended him.

In February 1941 he was appointed director of the first American Red Cross blood bank, and is credited with the bloodmobile — mobile donation stations that could collect blood and refrigerate it on the spot, extending the reach of the system far beyond hospitals. That same year he became the first African American surgeon appointed as an examiner to the American Board of Surgery.

Then came the military's segregation of donated blood, and in 1942 Drew resigned. The policy was a fiction with a body count: plasma from a Black donor and plasma from a white one are indistinguishable, and Drew knew better than anyone alive that they were.

Howard

He returned to Freedmen's Hospital and Howard University in 1942 as surgeon and professor, and spent the rest of his life on a second project at least as consequential as the first: training Black surgeons in a country whose profession was largely closed to them. He had reason to understand the barrier personally. The District of Columbia chapter of the American Medical Association excluded Black physicians, and Drew died without ever having been admitted to the AMA.

The NAACP gave him the Spingarn Medal in 1944 for the British and American blood programmes. Honorary doctorates came from Virginia State College in 1945 and from Amherst in 1947. He had married Minnie Lenore Robbins, a home economics professor at Spelman, in 1939; they had three daughters and a son. His daughter Charlene Drew Jarvis later sat on the Council of the District of Columbia for two decades.

From 1939 he made an annual trip to free clinics at the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama. On 1 April 1950, driving there with three other Black physicians and exhausted, he lost control of the car near Burlington, North Carolina. It somersaulted three times. His leg injuries were catastrophic and his foot was trapped beneath the brake pedal. He was taken to Alamance General Hospital and pronounced dead about thirty minutes after doctors reached him. He was forty-five.

A story persists that Drew died because a white hospital refused to treat him — repeated in *M\*A\*S\*H* and in Philip Roth's *The Human Stain*. It is false. John Ford, a passenger in the car, said Drew's injuries were so severe that virtually nothing could have been done, and that a transfusion might have killed him faster. The myth endures because the underlying reality was true often enough elsewhere: Black patients were routinely turned away for want of "Negro beds" or under whites-only policies.

Why Charles Is Called a Genius

Drew's claim is not to a theoretical breakthrough. Plasma had been separated before him; transfusion existed. What he possessed was a systems mind of exceptional clarity — the ability to see that the bottleneck in transfusion medicine was not biology but logistics, and to design an entire operating apparatus around a single physical fact: plasma keeps for months where whole blood does not. From that property Drew built collection protocols, testing standards, sterility procedures, personnel training and mobile refrigerated collection, and made it all work at national scale inside five months, under wartime pressure, with no precedent to copy. That is engineering intelligence of a very high order applied to a medical problem, and it saved an incalculable number of lives.

The honest qualification is that "father of the blood bank" flattens a collective effort — Scudder, Beattie and the Blood Transfusion Betterment Association were all part of it, and Drew's Columbia work built on an existing literature. Some claims made for him, including sole invention of the bloodmobile, are stated more confidently in popular accounts than the record supports. He was also, importantly, not primarily a researcher after 1942; he chose teaching instead, and the decision cost him publications and prizes. What survives scrutiny is the standard of judgment: he got the science right when it was inconvenient, and he walked away from the most prestigious post in his field rather than administer a lie about blood.

Legacy

The Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science was incorporated in Los Angeles in 1966. His Arlington, Virginia home became a National Historic Landmark in 1976, and the Postal Service issued a stamp in his honour in 1981. Schools across the country carry his name, and in 2002 Molefi Kete Asante placed him among the hundred greatest African Americans. Every modern blood drive — the centralised collection, the tested and typed units, the refrigerated van in the car park — is running on the system he designed.

Achievements

• Spingarn Medal — 1944
• Held posts at Howard University Hospital and Howard University
• Fields: physician and hematology