Charles R. Drew
Wikimedia Commons
It wasn’t just female physicians like Marie Equi whom history often forgets, but also African-Americans like Charles Drew.
A physician and medical researcher during World War II, Drew’s development of the blood bank not only changed the course of the war, but human history.
Drew was born to a middle-class family in Washington, D.C., which gave him the opportunity to pursue a college degree. In 1933, after receiving his medical degree from McGill University in Montreal, Drew returned to the States to train as a surgeon, and became the first African-American physician appointed to the American Board of Surgery.
A few years later, Drew added another “first” to his belt when he became the first African-American to receive a graduate degree from Columbia University — which he completed, in Medical Science, just prior to the outbreak of WWII.
After the carnage of World War I, which left 17 million dead and 20 million wounded, the race to advance battlefield medicine was on, and the United States recruited Drew to help win it. Specifically, the idea of blood banking — storing blood in large amounts for future transfusions — needed refinement before the U.S. could put it into practice.
The States also expressed a need to transport blood to Great Britain, where the greatest threat existed at the beginning of World War II. Drew led the collection side of this program, which was based in New York City, and came up with the strategy and method which would enable all donations occur to at a central location.
As Drew continued to develop methods that would refine this process, he created what we now call the American Red Cross Blood Bank. If you’ve ever donated or received blood, you have Drew to thank for that.
Despite Drew’s game-changing work, he ultimately resigned from his post after legislation passed that prohibited people of color from donating blood. And in 1950, a fatal car accident closed the door on whatever else Drew may have achieved in his life.
Following the car accident, a myth circulated which said that Drew died because doctors refused to give him a blood transfusion on the basis of his skin color. But those who were with him and survived said that this wasn’t true: In fact, Drew’s injuries were so extensive that, despite the fact that he did receive emergency medical attention (which many African-Americans would have been refused at the time), he could not have been saved.
