Dr. Charles Drew, Medical Pioneer in Blood Work

Dr. Charles Drew was a pioneer in medicine who achieved recognition in a racially divided America for his work with blood collection and storage during World War II. But those who knew him said that his greatest pride was in having mentored many Black surgeons who might never have moved forward in the field of medicine if it hadn’t been for Dr. Drew.

Dr. Drew was one of several scientists working on ways to get blood to the battlefields. During World War I, many soldiers died because the only way blood could be transfused then was directly from the donor. Medical people needed effective ways to collect, store, and transport blood.

Among Dr. Drew’s many accomplishments with blood was finding a way to dry plasma, which lengthened its storage and shelf life. The plasma could then be reconstituted when needed. These and other discoveries saved thousands of lives during the war.

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The Drew Family

Charles Drew was one of four children born to middle-class parents. His father was a carpet-layer, and his mother trained as a teacher. The family lived in the Foggy Bottom section of northwest Washington, D.C. The neighborhood was interracial (though D.C. itself was segregated), so the Drews were aware of segregation but not always subjected to it.

As a boy, Charles Drew maintained a large paper route and later attended Dunbar High School, which was well-respected for offering opportunities to all. Drew was a gifted athlete, and he was offered an athletic scholarship by Amherst College (to be one of six Black students in a class of 600). He played on the football team and was asked to participate in track and field as well.  In his studies at Amherst, Drew became interested in science and medicine.

Medical School

During his senior year, Drew applied to the medical schools at Harvard, Howard University and McGill University in Canada. He lacked the required chemistry credits for Howard, and Harvard asked him to defer a year. (Most American colleges held only one spot for a Black student. Presumably, Harvard’s was filled.) However, McGill University, known to be more welcoming to Black students, accepted him for the upcoming year.

At McGill Medical School, Charles Drew excelled. He won the annual scholarship prize in neuroanatomy, was in the medical honor society, and qualified to be part of the staff of the McGill Medical Journal. In 1933, he graduated second in his class and received his M.D.C.M. degree (Doctor of Medicine and Master of Surgery).

Residency in Montreal

After McGill, Charles Drew accepted a residency at Montreal General Hospital. His mentor there was Dr. John Beattie, an anatomy professor who was conducting studies on blood transfusion and shock therapy. (No one then knew that a blood transfusion helped with treating someone in shock. This discovery would be vital during the war years.)

Scientists elsewhere were working on other necessities proven by World War I. They needed to find a way to manage blood so that it could be delivered to the battlefields. Up until the 1930s, blood transfusions needed to be given directly from donor to recipient and only among people with the same blood type.  

Work on Plasma and Storage

At Montreal Hospital, Doctors Beattie and Drew were making progress in two areas: plasma and blood storage.

Plasma is a clear yellow liquid containing proteins and electrolytes that carries blood cells and other substances through the body. Beattie and Drew’s laboratory was working on methods to separate the liquid part of the blood from the whole blood (where the red blood cells exist). 

In their work, they also realized that plasma was interchangeable with all blood types.  When a whole blood transfusion is unnecessary, a plasma transfusion could be administered, regardless of blood type. This was an extraordinary discovery.

During World War I, small quantities of blood could be stored briefly, but it required constant refrigeration. This was not easy during wartime.

Dr. Beattie’s and Dr. Drew’s experimentation with different types of blood products showed that when separated, blood plasma could be stored for a longer period of time than whole blood. There was also less risk of contamination.

Moving Back to the U.S.

After Dr. Drew finished his work under Dr. Beattie, he accepted a faculty position as a professor of surgery at the predominantly Black Howard University. After two years at Howard, he joined the staff of the Freedman’s Hospital, a federally-operated facility connected to Howard. He taught and performed surgeries.  

Fellowship at Columbia

In 1938, Charles Drew was awarded a two-year Rockefeller fellowship in surgery at Columbia University. As part of the fellowship, he worked at Presbyterian Hospital under eminent surgeon Allen Whipple. (Whipple was the first doctor to create a way to perform pancreatic cancer surgery.)

Drew’s graduate work at Columbia was a continuation of the work he had done on blood in Montreal. His doctoral thesis was “Banked Blood: A Study on Blood Preservation,” Among other information presented in the study, Dr. Drew showed that blood plasma could be preserved for two months. This was longer than the shelf life of whole blood.  He also proved that when dried, the plasma lasted even longer. Then when needed, the plasma could be reconstituted to its original form.

Based on his thesis, he was awarded a Doctor of Science in Medicine. He was the first Black man to receive this advanced degree from Columbia (1940).

In September of 1939, Drew married Minnie Lenore Robbins, a professor at Spelman College. They went on to have 4 children. (His children all excelled; one daughter became a neuroscientist.)

Recruited for Blood Bank

After obtaining his advanced degree, Charles Drew was recruited by transfusion specialist Dr. John Scudder who obtained funding to set up an experimental blood bank. Scudder was in talks with British doctors about how America’s findings about plasma could be put to work to help Britain. The country was seeing many injuries because of the Blitz (the German bombing of Britain in 1940-41.)

Scudder appointed Charles Drew as Supervisor of the Blood Transfusion Association for New York City where he also oversaw the Blood for Britain program.

The Challenge

When Drew stepped in, medical centers around the country were already attempting blood collection for the war, but each hospital collected the blood  differently and used their own methods for preservation. This meant that a good deal of blood could not be used, and the Blood for Britain program was in danger of failing.

Drew implemented methods for systematically collecting, treating, and storing the blood. Drawing on Drew’s research, scientists working on the project separated plasma, tested it, and then stored it. It was then bottled in 1-liter units and shipped to Britain by the Red Cross.

The new system was Immensely successful. Blood for Britain collected over 14,500 blood donations and sent 5000 liters of plasma to Britain.

Red Cross Undertakes Expansion of Blood Bank

After the success of Blood for Britain, the National Research Council and the American Red Cross planned a national blood donation and banking system. Charles Drew’s use of dried plasma was game-changing. The Red Cross offered him the job of organizing the blood program for the Red Cross.

As he had done before, Drew set up a system of uniform procedures and standards for collecting blood as well as packing it into kits where it could be sent to hospitals or directly to a battlefield. Dr. Drew also developed mobile blood donation stations (“bloodmobiles”).

The Question of “Mixing”

The scientists working with blood knew that all people produce the same kind of blood. However, an outside group decided that blood should not be mixed: a white person needing blood must not be given blood from a Black person.

As the Red Cross moved through the stresses of war on behalf of the military, the Army and the Red Cross decided the correct action was to forbid Blacks from donating blood. They disregarded the growing need for donated blood, and disregarded the fact that Blacks were now serving on or near battlefields. What would happen if one of them needed blood?

After the Red Cross announced that Blacks would not be permitted to donate blood, there was an overwhelming outcry of protest. The Red Cross back-tracked and concluded that blood should be segregated. White donated blood would be given to white people; Black soldiers would be given blood donated by Blacks.

And there the matter rested for a time.

Dr. Drew Moves On

After six months with the Red Cross, Dr. Drew returned to Howard University. Some wrote that the decision about segregating the blood was the factor that led to his decision, but historian Spencie Love, author of One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew (1996), combed through massive amounts of research pertaining to Dr. Drew. She wrote there was no indication as to that being the cause.

The work Dr. Drew loved was surgery and teaching. It was fitting that after getting a program up and running, Drew would want to return to Howard’s Medical Program.  In the 1940s,  few hospitals accepted Black students for residencies. (Drew himself was turned down by Mayo Clinic because he was Black.)  Returning to Howard to mentor incoming doctors was his top priority.

Drew Takes a Stand on Blood Segregation

But Charles Drew most certainly had an opinion about “mixing” blood, based on his scientific research. In 1942, he wrote: “As you know, there is no scientific basis for the separation of the bloods of different races except on the basis of the individual blood types or groups.”

Two years later in a letter to the director of the Federal Labor Standards Association, he was more blunt about blood separation in the National Blood Bank: “I think the Army made a grievous mistake, a stupid error in first issuing an order to the effect that blood for the Army should not be received from Negroes. It was a bad mistake for 3 reasons: (1) No official department of the Federal Government should willfully humiliate its citizens; (2) There is no scientific basis for the order; and (3) They need the blood.”

Return to Howard

With Drew’s return to Howard in 1941, he served for the next nine years as the Chief of Surgery at Freedman’s Hospital.  For him, the mission to train the next generation was of utmost importance. At the time of Charles Richard Drew’s death in 1950, nearly half the Black physicians in the country had gotten their start because of Dr. Drew. 

Other achievements while at Freedman’s Hospital included a shared patent for an intravenous surgical needle for blood delivery (1943; Patent # 2,389,355.) In 2015, Drew was admitted posthumously  to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.  

The Death of Charles Drew and the Ongoing Controversy

On April 1, 1950, Dr. Charles Drew died in a one-car crash in Almance County, North Carolina. He was traveling with three other doctors on the way to a medical conference in Tuskegee, Alabama. Drew had suggested driving as he knew that two of the doctors couldn’t afford plane fare.

On March 31, Drew worked a full day at Freedman’s Hospital including presenting a lecture that evening. After the lecture, he did his final hospital rounds and then went to meet the other doctors so they could leave that night.

One of the other doctors took the first stint driving, but about 5 a.m., they crossed the Virginia-North Carolina border and stopped to have something to eat. They also changed drivers. Dr. Drew took the wheel. He and the other doctors must have all dozed off.  Suddenly, the right wheels of the car hit the shoulder of the road, waking them. Drew instinctively pulled on the wheel to turn the car sharply left. This caused the car to roll over.

The Crash

On the driver’s side, the car doors snapped open. Cars then had no seatbelts, so both Dr. Drew and his colleague Dr. Ford were thrown from the car.

Dr. Ford broke several bones and suffered cuts and a bad gash to his leg, but he was thrown clear. The car rolled over Charles Drew, causing multiple injuries to his chest and head.

The two shaken but uninjured doctors got up to assess their friends’ situation. Neighbors who heard the crash called an ambulance. Before long, a highway patrol officer showed up.

The ambulance arrived within about 15 minutes. The emergency responders put Dr. Drew on a stretcher, and one of the unhurt doctors climbed into the ambulance to accompany him to the hospital.

Where the Accident Occurred

The car crash happened in Almance County, a county with a small population that was both mixed and segregated.  Almance General Hospital was the only medical facility in the county. It was a small privately-owned hospital that would have been intended for the white population. In 1948, an emergency room was added but given the size of the county, it was minimally supplied.

Anyone requiring advanced care and deemed healthy enough for the trip would have been sent on to the hospital at Duke University. There was also a Black Hospital elsewhere where patients were sometimes sent.

Bringing Dr. Drew to Almance

Dr. Drew is described as light-skinned, so the ambulance drivers may have assumed he was white, or they may simply evaluated the emergency and realized they had to get help as quickly as possible.

At any rate, Drew was taken to Almance Hospital, and Dr. Ford, who was also hurt, was taken there, too. A passing motorist stopped and offered to take him since there wasn’t room in the ambulance.

Dr. George Carrington was one of several doctors who owned Almance. A crash of this type created news immediately, so when Drew and Ford were brought into the hospital, Dr. Carrington came out to see who was going on.

After only a moment of seeing the man on the stretcher, he said. “Is that Dr. Drew?”

The Almance doctor on assignment for emergency cases that morning was Harold Kernodle Sr., an orthopedic surgeon whose brother also worked there.  The doctors saw that Drew needed immediate attention. Both Kernodles as well as Carrington and another doctor, Ralph Brooks, stepped in and out of the room where Drew was being treated. They started fluids, including plasma on him, but the injuries were too serious. He died within an hour.

Dr. Ford’s Injuries

In the meantime, Dr. Ford’s broken arm and other bones were set. The bad gash on his leg was sewn up, and he was taken to the basement where there were four beds dedicated to Black patients. (This was customary in the South. A certain number of beds were dedicated to the Black population. If those beds were taken, future patients were turned away.)

Dr. Drew’s Family

When Dr. Drew’s wife was notified of his death, she was told of what happened and the treatment he was given.  Later, she sent thank you notes to the staff of the hospital for doing what they could to save her young husband. 

Rumors Began Shortly

Within weeks, rumors began to spread in the community and among the medical conference attendees where Dr. Drew was to speak. There were various forms of the story:

• “The man who created the blood bank system for the United States and Britain was taken to a white hospital where he was refused a badly-needed transfusion and died.”
• “Dr. Drew was injured and taken to a white hospital where he was turned away.”
• “They refused to give him blood, and he died.”

The rumors spread for so many months that it became the “myth of Dr. Drew’s death.” But historian Spencie Love tracked carefully through all available information for her book, “One Blood.” She went through papers, viewed hospital records, and spoke to family members as well as the colleagues traveling with Dr. Drew. They were all in agreement—regardless of what the rumors were, Dr. Charles Drew received the appropriate medical treatment following a very serious accident.

From the time of the accident, Drew family members and his colleagues devoted time to right the wrong perception of Drew’s care, but nothing worked. The story continued.

Becomes Legend

Love writes that fourteen years later (1964), Whitney Young (1921-1971), the national director of the Urban League, wrote that Drew was denied care. He expanded on this information in newspaper columns and speeches. Whitney Young was highly esteemed and people believed he had to be right.

As historian Love worked to unravel the persistence of the untruth, she writes that the legend served a purpose. Just as family stories (and fairy tales) are told and re-told for a reason, so, too, was the legend of Dr. Drew’s death.

To prove her point, Love went out to learn more about what happened to other Black patients in the South.

Black Health Care in the South

In her research, Spencie Love documented that Drew and Ford were fortunate. In the South, it was customary to send Black patients away from white hospitals. Of course, the Black hospitals were often several hours away and were less well-equipped.

To provide a concrete example, Love details the story of Maltheus Avery, a Black man who was a veteran of World War II and was supporting a young family while traveling back and forth to a college that was an hour away. Avery, too, had a car accident on this stretch of the highway. An ambulance picked him up and rushed him to Almance Hospital. The doctors there saw that the Avery’s injury was to the head, and they sent him on to Duke University where they had expertise in these types of wounds.

But when the ambulance arrived at Duke, all the beds allotted for Black patients were filled. The Duke doctors turned him away, saying he belonged at the Black Hospital, where of course, they didn’t have the necessary expertise. But it didn’t matter. Avery died en route.

Another Chilling Story

One other bone-chilling story is worth sharing. Two brothers were at home working on a science experiment to present at school the next day. Something went wrong. An explosion went off in the face of one of the boys. Their father put the family in the car and drove to the nearest hospital. But they were Black, and the hospital refused to help them. Tears streamed down the father’s face, as he begged them to help his son. They refused, and the boy was blinded by the accident.

 Would more rapid treatment care have changed this boy’s fate? That family will never know.

Legends Exist for a Reason

As historian Love writes, rumors/myths/legends exist for a reason. While Dr. Charles Drew may have received the best care possible, far too many Blacks have always known they would never receive proper health care– from slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and beyond.

Even today, the statistics for the health of people of color are generally much worse than for the white population. According to the Office of Minority Health, (part of the Department for Health and Human Services) Black people are at higher risk for heart disease, stroke, cancer, asthma, influenza and pneumonia, diabetes, HIV/Aids and Covid.

Some Medical Devices not Color Neutral

In further illustration of this point, The Los Angeles Times (February 20, 2024) wrote about how the medical establishment was only now admitting the misinformation provided by pulse oximeters, which are widely used for initial screening for Covid.  Black people often register that their blood oxygen is acceptable with a pulse oximeter, when actually their oxygen level is dangerously low.

Skin pigmentation seems to interfere with proper reading, and thousands died of Covid when they might have been saved.

So What about Dr. Drew?

Is the story about Dr. Drew’s death true? According to sources, it is not. However, the disparity between the health care for Black vs. white people is still very much an issue. While Black people are no longer sent off to a “Black hospital,” they may wait longer to be seen in a crowded neighborhood emergency room where there is inadequate staffing or a dearth of medical supplies. Black women have long said that their health issues are taken less seriously by the medical establishments. The disparity between successful Black births vs. white births bears this out.  See Midwife in Georgia Improved Birth Rates for Black Women.

For that reason, it is understandable that the legend is still repeated even now. It serves a purpose to remind people that this issue is serious indeed.

Dr. Drew’s Legacy

Charles Drew broke barriers in a racially divided country to become one of most important scientists in the country. His work relating to blood banks and blood transfusions was groundbreaking and saved thousands of lives. His mentorship to Black doctors increased the odds that there would be more doctors available to help people get the care they deserve.

He received many honors. The Springarn Medal was awarded to him in 1944 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (The Springarn Medal was established in 1914 to be given annually to recognize great achievements by African Americans.

Many schools and medical departments and health facilities have been named in his memory, and there were numerous other honors as well. In 1976, the National Park Service designated the Charles Richard Drew house in Arlington County, Virginia, a National Historic Landmark. In 1981, the United States Postal Service created a 35-cent stamp with Charles Drew’s likeness on it.

There is a Charles Richard Drew Memorial Bridge in Washington, D.C. and a park in Montreal named for him. His name is often on several lists of 100 Greatest African Americans.

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My father was badly injured in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. I have little doubt that Dr. Drew’s work helped my family.

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