ByCate Lineberry
Published February 1, 2024
In the late 1930s, people could donate blood, but very few hospitals could store it for later use. Whole blood breaks down quickly, and there were no protocols at the time for safely preserving it. As a result, hospitals often did not have the appropriate blood type when patients needed it. Charles Drew, a Black surgeon and researcher, helped solve this monumental problem for medicine, earning him the title “Father of the Blood Bank.”
(Why February is Black History Month—and more about Black history in America.)
In 1938, while obtaining his doctorate in medicine, Drew became a fellow at Columbia University’s prestigious Presbyterian Hospital in New York. He studied the storage and distribution of blood, including the separation of its components, and applied his findings to an experimental blood bank at the hospital. His revolutionary work led to the discovery of methods for safely and effectively processing and preserving blood and his recommendation that hospitals create their own blood banks.
Drew then directed the Blood for Britain campaign in 1940, which successfully sent much needed blood plasma, the portion of blood that contains no cells and lasts longer, overseas. Shortly after, as the United States prepared to enter World War II, he drew on that experience to organize what became the first U.S. national blood bank. His discoveries and his leadership saved countless lives.
(Why the FDA eased limits on gay and bisexual men giving blood.)
Path to medicine
Drew was born on June 3, 1904, in segregated Washington, D.C., to middle-class parents who stressed education and responsibility. The oldest of five children, Drew showed maturity and ingenuity at an early age. At 12, he was selling newspapers from a street corner. By 13, he had six newspaper boys working for him.
He attended Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, a nationally recognized Black high school in the city. He was considered bright, but he excelled more in athletics than in schoolwork, lettering in four sports.
After graduating in 1922, he attended Amherst College in Massachusetts on an athletic scholarship, where he was one of only 13 Black students in a class of 600. He and his Black teammates routinely faced hostility from opposing teams and were refused service at restaurants when they traveled for games. Drew was also denied captainship of the football team in his senior year because of his race, even though he was the school’s best athlete.
As an undergraduate, Drew became interested in medicine and was encouraged by a biology professor to pursue it. By the time Drew graduated in 1926, he knew he wanted to attend medical school. To afford it, he worked for the next two years as an athletic director and a biology and chemistry teacher at Morgan College in Baltimore, Maryland.
When choosing a medical school, race limited Drew’s options. Most Black medical students at the time attended either Howard University in Washington, D.C., or Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. Drew was rejected from his first choice, Howard, and accepted but deferred from Harvard University, which only took a few non-white students each year. Anxious to begin, Drew decided to attend McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine in Montréal, Canada. In 1933 he graduated second in his class of 137 students.
Rumors of his death
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Charles Drew is photographed in his lab at Howard University in 1945.
Courtesy the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives
Drew suffered serious injuries in a car accident on April 1, 1950, near Burlington, North Carolina. The doctors at Alamance General Hospital, a segregated facility for white people, cared for Drew, but he was too severely injured to survive. Soon after his death, rumors spread that Drew died because the hospital refused to treat him. Witnesses at the hospital, survivors of the accident, his family, and others have all repeatedly discredited the claims. The urban legend lingers because there was a history of African Americans often being denied treatment at white hospitals during this era.
Transfusion medicine
After graduation, Drew took an internship and surgical residency at Montréal General Hospital, where his interest in transfusion medicine was born. Blood transfusions had only become widely used 30 years earlier with the discovery of the four basic groups of blood type antigens: A, B, AB, and O.
Drew returned to Washington, D.C., and taught pathology at Howard University College of Medicine. He was also a surgical instructor and chief surgical resident at Freedmen’s Hospital.
In 1938 Drew began postgraduate work at New York’s Columbia University, and he was awarded a prestigious fellowship at Presbyterian Hospital. He studied under John Scudder, who had been granted funding to set up an experimental blood bank to study the storage and distribution of blood.
Drew’s work with Scudder became the basis for his 1940 dissertation, “Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation,” in which he reported their findings for the long-term storage of plasma. Scudder called Drew’s thesis “a masterpiece.” It would form the basis of Drew’s major innovations to come.
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Wartime needs
As Drew was finishing his degree at Columbia, World War II was erupting in Europe. Great Britain was asking the United States for desperately needed plasma to help victims of the Blitz. Given his expertise, Drew was selected to be the medical director for the Blood for Britain campaign.
Using Presbyterian Hospital’s blood bank as a template, Drew established uniform procedures and standards for collecting blood and processing blood plasma from nine New York hospitals and sending the plasma safely overseas. The five-month campaign collected donations from 15,000 Americans and was deemed a success.
With the increasing likelihood that the nation would be drawn into war, the United States wanted to capitalize on what Drew had learned from the campaign. He was recruited as the assistant director of a three-month pilot program to mass-produce dried plasma in New York, which became the model for the first Red Cross blood bank. His innovations for this program included mobile blood donation stations, later called bloodmobiles.
Going mobile
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Donating blood is so easy to do now that it can happen almost anywhere, thanks to mobile donation units, better known as bloodmobiles. When Charles Drew invented them in 1941, they were called “self-contained collection centers on specially built trucks.” There were 63 of them in use during World War II as part of a national blood drive. By the war’s end, some 6.7 million American volunteers had donated more than 13 million pints of blood.
Ironically, Drew was initially forbidden to participate in the program he created because the U.S. military refused to allow the Red Cross to accept donations from Black Americans. After protests from the Black press and the NAACP, the policy changed in 1942 to allow Black people to donate, but it still required all blood to be segregated.
Categorizing the policy as unscientific and insulting, Drew resigned his position in 1942. “It is fundamentally wrong for any great nation to willfully discriminate against such a large group of its people,” he later said. “One can say quite truthfully that on the battle-fields nobody is very interested in where the plasma comes from when they are hurt … It is unfortunate that such a worthwhile and scientific bit of work should have been hampered by such stupidity.”
(A bloody 19th-century health craze almost drove these creatures extinct.)
Greatest contributions
Drew returned to Howard University as chief surgeon at Freedmen’s Hospital, where he mentored a new generation of medical students and residents while campaigning against the exclusion of Black doctors from local medical societies, medical specialty organizations, and the American Medical Association. He considered his training of young Black surgeons to be his greatest contribution to medicine.
Drew continued to be recognized for his achievements, but his life was tragically cut short in the early hours of April 1, 1950, when he was just 45 years old. Drew was driving to a medical conference in Alabama when he fell asleep at the wheel near Burlington, North Carolina. The car flipped several times, leaving Drew with life-threatening injuries. He was rushed to a local hospital, which had segregated wards but a shared emergency room. Three white doctors gave Drew transfusions and consulted with doctors at nearby Duke University Medical Center to try to save his life, but his injuries were too serious to overcome. In November 1950, seven months after his death, the American Red Cross announced that it would omit the racial designation once required of blood donors.
(Plessy v. Ferguson aimed to end segregation—but codified it instead.)
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