Charles Drew & Blood Banks

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. In our
recent episode on the Coconut Grove fire, we mentioned that

(00:21):
blood banking was really a brand new innovation when the
fire happened, and that you could expect an episode on
that which was at that moment in the works. That's
what we are talking about today, and we're going to
focus on one particular person who was a big part
of the development of blood banks. That was Dr Charles Drew.

(00:44):
His friend and colleague William Montague Cobb, who we covered
on the podcast in February, described Dr Drew as quote
one of the most constructively active figures in the medical profession.
Charles Richard Drew was born in Washington, d c. On
June third, nine four. He was the oldest child of

(01:07):
Richard and Nora Burrow Drew. Richard Drew was a carpet layer,
and he was the only black member of the otherwise
whites only Carpet, Linoleum and Soft Tile Layers Union, also
serving as the financial secretary of the union's DC local.
Nora had a teaching degree from Howard University, and she
did some volunteer work, but was primarily a full time

(01:29):
wife and mother. Charles went by Charlie and his younger
siblings were Joseph, Elsie, Nora, and Eva. The Drews were
really close knit, middle class family. They were members of
nineteen Street Baptist Church and the children attended Washington, d c.
Segregated schools for black children. They also had access to
a segregated swimming pool where Charlie learned to swim and

(01:53):
quickly proved that he was a talented athlete. He earned
his first swimming medal at the age of eight. Charlie
was also described as clever, hardworking, and reliable. He started
selling newspapers to earn extra money at the age of twelve,
and he quickly developed this into a whole enterprise in
which he managed six other newspaper boys, like William Montague

(02:17):
Cob Charlie attended Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School. Dunbar was
the first public high school for black students in the US,
and it had become one of the best college preparatory
schools in the country. But Charlie's best performance at Dunbar
was As an athlete. He lettered in four sports, and
in his junior and senior years he was awarded the

(02:40):
James E. Walker Memorial Medal for all around athletic performance.
Charlie also served as captain of the high school Cadet Corps,
and he was very well liked among his peers. In
the yearbook, they named him best Athlete, most popular student,
and student who has done the most for the school.

(03:00):
After graduating from Dunbar, both Charles Drew and William Montague
Cob went to Amherst College in Massachusetts. Many Dunbar graduates
went on to college there, and most of Amherst Black
students had graduated from Dunbar. When Drew and Cobb were there,
the college had about six hundred students, and thirteen of
them were black. Drew hoped to become an engineer, even

(03:23):
though at this point there were almost no black engineers
in the United States. Drew continued to truly excel as
an athlete while at Amherst, but he and his black
teammates also faced discrimination, both at Amherst and while on
the road for games. This included everything from being denied

(03:44):
seating at restaurants to being targeted and harassed by players
on opposing teams, and based on his athletic performance, Drew
should have been named captain of both the football and
track teams his senior year, but a white player was
elected captain of the football team instead. The same thing

(04:04):
had happened on both the cross country and track teams
when Drew was a junior, so this definitely looked like
a pattern of racism. Drew seems to have tried to
avoid controversy, supporting the elected captain and later being unanimously
elected captain of the track team. He earned multiple medals
and awards for his athletic performance during his time at Amherst,

(04:26):
including the Howard Hill Mossman Trophy, which went to the
student who had brought the greatest honor to athletics during
their time at the college. Drew also had some experiences
while at Amherst that shifted his focus from engineering some medicine.
He had never been a particularly exceptional student. William Montague

(04:46):
Cobb described him as never earning a grade above a sea,
but biology professor Otto Glazer got him interested in science.
Drew also had a sports injury that required surgery and
that led him to start thinking about medicine and surgery
as a field, and in May of nineteen twenty, his sister,

(05:06):
Elsie died. In a med school application, he wrote, quote,
my first real urgent desire to study medicine came when
my sister died with an attack of influenza. In the
great epidemic here in nineteen twenty. No one seemed to
be able to stop it, and people died by the
hundreds every week. I have studied the sciences diligently since

(05:28):
that time, so this would have been at the very
very end of the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic, and it
really illustrates how even though we usually talk about that
pandemic in terms of nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen, there
were still significant outbreaks happening into nineteen twenty, and the
people living through it felt like this was all part
of one pandemic. It was all part of the same thing.

(05:51):
I can't imagine what that's like. Charles True graduated from
Amherst College in nineteen twenty six, but he didn't have
money for medical school. He got a job at Morgan
College in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was athletic director and
instructor of biology and chemistry. Much as he had excelled
as an athlete, he excelled as a coach, and he

(06:11):
was credited with really turning around some of the school's teams,
especially in football and basketball. Yeah, this is all he
He applied all of this to his later work in medicines,
the things he had learned as an athlete and as
a coach. After saving money for two years, Drew thought
he was financially ready for medical school, but actually finding

(06:35):
a medical school to go to was a challenge. Most
medical schools at this point did not accept black students
at all, or if they did, they only accepted a
very limited number. This was also in the post Flexner
Report era. We did an episode about the flex Inner
Report on the show in July of This was a

(06:57):
report on the state of medical education in the United States,
and its author, Abraham Flexner, described most of the medical
schools for black students as subpar. In the wake of
this report, every black medical school that Flexner had described
as lacking closed, So when Drew started applying to medical

(07:18):
school in there were only two schools for black students left.
They were a Harry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, and
Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, d C. Drew
applied at Howard and at Harvard Medical School, which, unlike
most of the rest of Harvard, is in Boston rather
than Cambridge. Harvard had admitted its first black students in

(07:42):
eighteen fifty, but its medical students were still overwhelmingly white.
He was accepted at Harvard, although he had submitted his
application late and was asked to defer his enrollment by
a year because the incoming class was already full, But
his application at Howard was denied on the grounds that
he did have enough credits in English. Howard instead offered

(08:03):
him a faculty position as a coach, which Drew found
incredibly frustrating. It seemed bizarre that the school thought his
English education was good enough to teach, but not to
be a student. I admit that does seem very strange.
Drew didn't want to wait another year to start medical school,

(08:24):
so rather than going to Harvard, he made one more application.
That was to McGill University College of Medicine in Montreal, Canada,
which was racially integrated and had a reputation for being
at least somewhat more welcoming to black students. We will
get to his time in Montreal and what happened after
that after we take a quick sponsor break. At McGill

(08:56):
University College of Medicine, Charles Drew made a name for
himself as both a students and an athlete. He became
captain of the track team and was the champion in hurdles,
the high jump, and the broad jump. He was also
inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society, and
he took first prize at an annual competition in neuro anatomy.

(09:19):
In his final year, he was awarded the Williams Prize,
which was based on a competitive exam. At the same time,
these were difficult years, especially financially. The university was in
an expensive area, so his housing and dated a living
expenses were well beyond what he was used to. The
Great Depression started about a year after he enrolled, which

(09:41):
made things harder. He almost ran out of money with
only a year left to go, but then he was
awarded a one thousand dollar Rosenwald Fellowship. Without that he
probably would have had to drop out. Drew graduated second
in his class in nine three with a Doctor of Medicine,
and Master of Surgery degree. From there, he spent two

(10:02):
years at Montreal General Hospital, first as an intern and
then as a resident and internal medicine. While he was there,
he worked with a bacteriology professor John Beatty on the
human body's fluid balance and ways to use fluids to
treat shock. During Drew's residency, several patients were badly burned
during a fire at the hospital. Drew was one of

(10:25):
the doctors on duty, and during the crisis he used
transfusions to treat multiple patients for shock. This may have
been an inspiration for his later work on blood banking.
Not much was known about how to safely store blood
for later use, and many transfusions involved a human donor
in the room with the patient connected arm to arm.

(10:46):
It was clear that medical facilities needed better ways to
store things like blood and plasma. You know, we'll be
talking a bit more about the state of transfusion history
and just a little bit. In December of nineteen thirty four,
as he was finishing his residency in Montreal, Drew started
trying to find a surgical residency in the United States,

(11:09):
specifically at the Mayo Clinic, but his application was denied
At this point, most black doctors did their residencies at
one of six black hospitals, but there were almost no
residency opportunities for black doctors and specialties like surgery. Like
most of the people who are doing residencies are doing

(11:29):
internal medicine, general medicine, family practice type of work. Even
if a predominantly white medical school did accept black students,
the affiliated teaching hospitals often did not allow black people
in roles that involved patient care. They were basically prioritizing
the feelings of racist doctors and patients who might not

(11:52):
want to work with a black person. In the face
of all of this, Drew wrote a letter to William Montayucab,
who was working at Howard, asking what the setup was
like at the university. In spite of Howard having previously
rejected his med school application, Drew thought there might be
some way to continue his training there. Just after this,

(12:12):
Drew also needed to return to Washington, d C. For
personal reasons. His father died in January of nineteen thirty five,
and his family needed his help. Beyond needing to be
back in Washington, d C. It turned out that this
was the right time for Drew to take another look
at Howard. Howard University was established in eighteen sixty seven,

(12:33):
and it's College of Medicine had its first classes a
year later. Although Howard is a historically black university, its founder,
Oliver Otis Howard, was white, and for decades after it
was established, the faculty and the administration were also overwhelmingly white.
That started to change in the nineteen twenties. Mordechai Johnson

(12:54):
became Howard's first black president, and the university started actively
trying to recruit black professors and to generally improve the
quality of all of its departments and schools. When it
came to the School of Medicine, this was tricky. Howard
had been training black doctors for decades, but almost none
of them had any opportunity for specialized training or advanced

(13:16):
postgraduate education in medicine. That meant that graduates from the
medical school were qualified to practice medicine, but not necessarily
to teach, especially to teach any kind of medical specialty.
Changing that pattern meant recruiting black doctors and helping them
continue their education, with the goal that they would then
become part of the faculty at Howard. This also came

(13:39):
up in our episode on William Montague Cobb, who went
on to advance study in anatomy and physical anthropology. As
part of this same effort, Drew wrote a letter to
one of his old coaches at Dunbar High about this
and about the opportunity he was now seeing. Quote seventy
years there has been a Howard med School, but there
is still no tradition. No able surgeon has ever been

(14:03):
trained there, No school of thought has been born there.
Few of their stars have ever hit the headlines in
American surgery. There are no Negro representatives in so far
as the men who count now. All Negro doctors are
just country practitioners, capable of sitting with the poor and

(14:23):
the sick of their race, but not given to too
much intellectual activity, and not particularly interested in advancing medicine.
This attitude I should like to change. It should be
great sport. Drew took a position at Howard University College
of Medicine and became chief resident at Freedman's Hospital. In

(14:47):
that same year, Edward Lee Howse was hired as chief
of Surgery. House was white, but his hiring was part
of a five year plan in which he would run
the surgical program while a black surgeon was trained as
his successor. Funding for this came from a grant from
the Rockefeller Foundation. Soon Charles Drew was pursuing a doctorate

(15:07):
of medical science at Columbia University and a fellowship at
Presbyterian Hospital. Drew was Columbia's first black resident, and Presbyterian
Hospital had been established to serve quote the poor of
New York without regard to race, creed, or color. But
even so, everybody at the university and the hospital seemed

(15:28):
to assume that Drew was going to be working in
a lab, not with patients. This included surgical department head
Alan O. Whipple, whose name you might recognize if you've
ever had particular surgeries or watched medical TV shows. So
at first, Drew worked mainly with Assistant Professor of Clinical Surgery,

(15:48):
John Scudder, whose team was working on research related to
the body's fluid, balanced blood chemistry and blood transfusions. So
this did build on some of Drew's earlier work with
John Beaty at McGill, and it included trying to develop
blood tests to detect signs of shock. Scudder was immediately
impressed by Drew, and as Drew gained his support. He

(16:11):
eventually got Whipple to let him move into patient care
as well. A lot of the credit for this goes
to Drew's knowledge, skill, dedication, and personality. He had always
been extremely well liked anywhere he had studied and worked.
Colleagues described him as lighting up everyone around him when
he arrived on the ward, even if that was at

(16:31):
two a m. But there's also some speculation that his
approval to do patient care was also tied to his appearance.
Drew and his family all had very light skin, so
patients might think he was white. Drew apparently mentioned his
race when introducing himself to people because it was important
to him that they knew that he was black. I'm

(16:53):
really curious about exactly what that introduction sounded like like
that that aspect of it wasn't mentioned in the in
the biography that made that note, but I wonder. A
big part of Drew's work continued to be related to
blood and plasma transfusions. So we've talked a little bit
about the history of blood transfusions on the show before,

(17:16):
including in a two parter on Jean Baptiste Deny that
came out in January of one Denise work took place
in the seventeenth century, and it involved transfusions from animals
to humans. The first human to human blood transfusions took
place about a hundred and fifty years later. American physician
Philip seeing Physics reportedly performed one in seventeen, but didn't

(17:40):
publish on his work. James Blundell successfully performed a human
to human transfusion on a patient who was experiencing postpartum bleeding,
and that one was documented in eighteen eighteen. These first
transfusions saved the lives of some patients, but others experienced
severe reactions, and it first actors didn't know the cause.

(18:02):
In the early twentieth century, Carl Landsteiner made a series
of discoveries that came to be known as the A
BO blood types, which come from antigens in a person's
red blood cells. Making sure that both the donor and
the recipient had the same blood type prevented most of
these reactions, although aspects of this were yet to be discovered.

(18:22):
Land Steiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this.
In n blood coagulates very quickly after being removed from
the body, so the first blood transfusions went directly from
one person's body into another's, either by drawing the donor's
blood into a surrender and injecting it into the recipient

(18:43):
right away, or by connecting each of them to an
apparatus that carried the blood through tubes from the donor
to the recipient. So instead of blood banks, at first,
hospitals maintained lists of people who were willing to be
contacted on short notice to come in and donate blood
when it was needed. My grandfather was one of these

(19:04):
people because he had OH negative blood. In nineteen fourteen,
researchers discovered that sodium citrate could be used as an anticoagulant,
but most transfusions continued to be direct transfusions, with the
donor and recipient being in the room together, because even
if the blood wasn't coagulating, it still broke down very quickly.

(19:25):
But during World War One, multiple doctors worked out ways
to keep blood cold, allowing them to store it for
a short time before administering it to a recipient. One
was Oswald Hope Robertson of the U. S. Army Medical Corps,
who established so called blood depots where donated blood was
kept on ice. Also during World War One, Gordon Are

(19:46):
Awards started researching the use of plasma rather than whole blood.
Plasma is the liquid part of the blood which contains water, proteins,
mineral salts, and other substances, but not the red bood cells,
white blood cells, or platelets. Plasma had a much longer
shelf life than whole blood, and it was less likely

(20:08):
to transmit some blood borne diseases since it didn't contain
those red blood cells. It could also be used regardless
of a person's blood type. It couldn't be used for
every single application that whole blood could, but in a
lot of cases it worked really well. By the nineteen thirties,
multiple physicians and research institutes were working on ways to use, preserve,

(20:30):
and store whole blood and plasma, as well as ways
to fraction out different plasma components to use for different purposes,
and researchers in the Soviet Union we're also making discoveries
about how to preserve, store, and use blood based on
work that they were doing with cadaver blood. Bringing all
of this knowledge together, Bernard Fantas, director of Cook County

(20:53):
Hospital in Chicago, as credited with opening the first blood
bank on March fifteenth, nineteen thirties. Even He's also credited
with coining the word blood bank, which he hoped would
make lay people comfortable with the idea of donating blood
and receiving donated blood. He was able to keep donated
blood usable for about ten days. Soon, other blood banks

(21:17):
followed to return to Charles Drew. In August of nineteen
thirty nine, he and John Scudder set up an experimental
blood bank at Presbyterian Hospital. Work at the blood bank
formed the basis of Drew's dissertation Banked Blood, A Study
and Blood Preservation. In This dissertation was more than three

(21:37):
hundred fifty pages long, summarizing the history that had led
up to the development of blood banks, along with what
was known about cadaver blood, placental blood, changes to blood
caused by preservation, different methods of preservation and their pros
and cons and the research that he and Scudder had
conducted at the experimental blood bank at Presbyterian Hospital. Scudder

(21:59):
called it quote one of the most distinguished essays ever written,
both in form and content. We'll talk about how Charles
Drew's career unfolded after finishing this work. After we take
a quick sponsor break. In April of ninety nine, while

(22:24):
Charles Drew was in his last year at Columbia University,
he went to the annual meeting of the John A.
Andrew Clinical Society at Tuskegee University in Alabama. This was
both a free clinic and a teaching and learning opportunity.
On the way there, he stopped in Atlanta, where he
saw many Lenore Robins known as Lenore at the dining

(22:46):
hall at Spellman College, where she was a professor of
home economics. Charles was interested in her and some of
their friends through a party and invited her to it.
He fell in love immediately, and he stopped in Atlanta
again on the way home from the conference to propose
to her. He described this as the only rash, unplanned,

(23:08):
unpremeditated thing he had done in years. Charles and Lenore
got married a few months later on September. Not long after,
in n Charles Drew became the first black person to
earn a medical doctorate from Columbia University. Later that year,
Charles and Lenore had their first child, a daughter named
BB like b B for blood bank. They would go

(23:32):
on to have three more children, Charlene Raya and Charles Jr.
After finishing at Columbia, Drew went back to Howard as planned,
he became an assistant professor of surgery and a surgeon
at Freedman's Hospital. He expected to spend the rest of
his career training Black surgeons. That is really what he

(23:54):
considered to be his life's work. But then World War
two intervened and Drew was asked to going the Blood
for Britain project. This was an effort to collect and
package massive amounts of blood plasma in the United States
and send it overseas to the UK, where it was
desperately needed during the Blitz. Other researchers involved included John

(24:17):
Scudder and E. H. L. Corwin. Drawing from what they
learned at the experimental blood Bank at Presbyterian Hospital, drew thesis,
and other research, they put together a plan to recruit
blood donors, separate out the plasma under sterile conditions, add
an anti microbial agent, test it, and package it in
glass bottles diluted with sterile saleine. Uh as somebody who

(24:41):
donates blood. The fact that they were using glass bottles
just threw me for a second, and then I was
like of course, they they didn't have the kind of
plastic that we used today at that point. At first,
Drew worked on this project while still keeping up his
duties at Howard, but in September he was us to
join the Blood for Britain project full time as its

(25:03):
medical director, so he took a leave of absence between then.
In January of nineteen forty one, the Blood for Britain
Project collected fourteen thousand, five hundred fifty six blood donations
and shipped more than five thousand liters of plasma to Britain.
This was a massive undertaking. It was on a scale

(25:25):
far beyond any of the blood banking efforts that existed
before this point. After the Blood for Britain Project ended,
Drew was asked to help establish a national blood bank
program through the American Red Cross, with technical aspects managed
by the National Research Council. While the Blood for Britain
program had used liquid plasma, the Red Cross program focused

(25:47):
primarily on dried plasma. Drew was medical director of a
pilot program that could become a template for large scale
efforts to collect and stockpile blood and blood plasma for
both civilian and military use. Drew again worked to develop
a standardized procedure that can be put into place at
donation centers all across the country and ensure that donated

(26:10):
blood was safe and stable. As part of this, he
helped develop mobile refrigerated blood donation centers, also known as
blood mobiles. Using systems and protocols that Drew developed, the
Red Cross collected thirteen million bottles of blood between nineteen
forty one and nineteen forty five. People started calling Drew

(26:31):
the father of the Blood Bank, although he insisted that
he should not get the soul credit for any of this.
He was really competitive throughout his life, but he also
carried his experience as an athlete who was a part
of a team into his work in medicine. He knew
that he did not do any of this by himself,
and that he was building on the work of many
other people. Drew was expected to stay on as medical

(26:55):
director at the Red Cross until the end of April
nineteen forty one, which was when is leave at Howard
was going to end, but for unclear reasons, he resigned
on April one. Letters that he sent to family and
friends around this time suggests that he was finding the
work stressful and difficult was maybe having some conflicts with
some of the people he was working with. He also

(27:17):
had a wife and a new baby at home, being
separated from them was hard for everyone involved. On top
of all of this, I mean, he was doing an
incredibly important, demanding wartime job, separated from his family, and
also trying to study for his American Board of Surgery exams.

(27:38):
Not a full plate at all. It's a lot a
lot of accounts of Drew's life give another reason, which
was the Red Cross's decision not to accept blood from
black donors. The Red Cross really did do this, but
timing doesn't line up with Drew's departure. This was tied
to a War Department policy which read quote, for reasons

(28:00):
which are not biologically convincing, but which are commonly recognized
as psychologically important. In America, it is not deemed advisable
to collect and mix Caucasian and Negro blood indiscriminately for
later administration two members of the military forces. The Red
Cross announced that it would exclude black donors to align

(28:20):
with the War departments policy in November of nineteen forty one,
so that was months after Drew left. Drew did, however,
speak out against this policy once it was in place,
as did many other physicians and civil rights organizations, including
the n double a CP. On January twenty one, nineteen
forty two, the Red Cross announced a change in policy, quote,

(28:43):
the American Red Cross, in agreement with the Army and Navy,
is prepared hereafter to accept blood donations from colored as
well as white persons, and deference to the wishes of
those for whom the plasma is being provided, the blood
will be processed separately, so that those receiving transfusions may
be given plasma from blood of their own race. I

(29:06):
have so many feelings this, of course, was still discriminatory,
and the idea that blood donations needed to be separated
by race was scientifically unfounded. Drew said of this quote,
I feel that the ruling of the United States Army
and Navy regarding the refusal of colored blood donors is
an indefensible one from any point of view. There is

(29:28):
no scientific basis for the separation of the blood of
different races, except on the basis of the individual blood
types or groups. He also gave interviews on the subject
and wrote letters to officials condemning the policy of segregating
blood donation by race. Yeah, he clearly was justifiably outraged
by this policy, It does not appear to have been

(29:50):
the reason that it he left the Red Cross, though
the timeline just does not intersect in that way. To
return to Drew his career, though he did pass his
board exam ms in April of nineteen forty one. By October,
he had become the head of the Department of Surgery
at Howard and chief surgeon at Freedman's Hospital, as well

(30:10):
as becoming an examiner for the American Board of Surgery.
While training black doctors and surgeons, he also advocated for
their medical careers and their inclusion in major medical societies,
many of which either excluded black members entirely or left
the membership requirements up to local chapters, with many of

(30:31):
those chapters excluding black people. Often this made black doctors
ineligible for jobs that required membership in an organization like
the a m A. Drew repeatedly advocated for the inclusion
of black members and the American Medical Association and the
American College of Surgeons. Drew continued to advance in his

(30:52):
own career as well. In nineteen forty four, he became
chair of the Surgical Section of the National Medical Association,
a national organization for black doctors. He became chief of
staff at Freedman's Hospital, and he was also awarded then
double a CP Spring arm Metal for achievement in recognition
of his work in blood banking. During his acceptance speech,

(31:14):
he said, quote, it is fundamentally wrong for any great
nation to willfully discriminate against such a large group of
its people. One can say quite truthfully that on the battlefield,
nobody is very interested in where the plasma comes from
when they are hurt. Later, in that same speech, he said, quote,
the blood is being sent from all parts of the world.

(31:35):
It is unfortunate that such a worthwhile and scientific bit
of work should have been hampered by such stupidity. The
Federal Labor Standards Association thought Drew's opinion on the issue
of segregating blood donations in and in response to them,
he said, quote, I think the Army made a grievous mistake,

(31:55):
a stupid error, in first issuing an order to the
effect that blood for army should not be received from negroes.
It was a bad mistake for three reasons. One, no
official department of the federal government should willfully humiliate its
citizens too, there is no scientific basis for the order,

(32:15):
and three, they need the blood. The Red Cross finally
ended its policy of segregating blood in nineteen fifty. In
nineteen five, Charles Drew was awarded an honorary doctorate from
Virginia State College, and Amber's College recognized him with an
honorary doctorate two years later. He also became Freedman's Hospitals

(32:37):
medical director in nineteen forty six, and that year he
was also elected to the International College of Surgeons. In
nineteen forty eight, Drew's first class of residents took their
Board of Surgery exams, and he was really worried about it.
He was confident in the education that they were getting
at Howard, but he also knew that most of the

(32:58):
other people taking the exams were from schools that were
a lot richer and a lot more prestigious. His wife
later relayed a story about getting a call from Howard
President Mordechai Johnson after the board exams were over, telling
her to tell Drew that one of his students had
come in second place. Charlie was obviously totally over the

(33:20):
moon about this, and then Leonora passed on the rest
of the message, which was that one of his other
students had come in first. I'm also crying, Holly and
I are both crying the sweetest thing. Okay, let me
collect myself for one moment. Drew had wanted to travel
to the UK during the Blood for Britain program to

(33:42):
see how things were going once the plasma arrived, but
the State Department refused to issue him a passport on
the grounds that his work was too important to put
his life at risk in that way. But he did
go overseas in as a consultant to the surge in
General of the U. S. Army, touring hospitals in our
pupied Europe. On March thirty one, fifty Charles Drew left Washington,

(34:05):
d C. With three residents from Howard John R. Ford,
Walter R. Johnson, and Samuel Bullock. They were headed for
the annual meeting of the Johnny Andrew Clinical Society in Tuskegee, Alabama.
They had planned to take turns driving through the night,
stopping as little as possible since so many places were

(34:25):
unsafe for black motorists. Today, Interstates and eighty five connect Washington,
d C. To Tuskegee, but the Interstate Highway system hadn't
been built yet, so they were really driving mostly along
state and federal highways through rural areas. Drew had worked
a long day at the hospital, spoken at a student
council banquet, and done one last set of rounds before

(34:48):
leaving Washington. A little before eight in the morning on
April one, outside of Burlington, North Carolina, he fell asleep
at the wheel. One of the other men called out
to wake him up, and he overcorrected and lost control
of the vehicle. Seat belts had been invented long before,
but they were not standard in automobiles yet. Drew was

(35:10):
thrown from the car, which rolled over him. Walter and
Samuel were mostly unhurt, but john Ford was also thrown
from the car and had a broken arm and other injuries.
The four men were taken to Elament's General Hospital by
an ambulance and in a car that was driven by
a passer by. Multiple people on staff recognized Charles Drew,

(35:32):
and soonwards spread through the hospital that doctor Drew from
the blood bank had been badly hurt. Four surgeons were
all part of Drew's care in the emergency room, George Carrington,
Harald Coronodal S, his younger brother Charles Coronodal, and Ralph Brooks.
Their treatments included giving Drew fluids and plasma, as the
hospital didn't have a bank for whole blood. Meanwhile, Drew's

(35:56):
colleagues started calling family and other doctors they knew in
the area to tell them what had happened. See Mason
Quick and remember Malloy, who had both trained at Howard
drove in from Winston Salem, where they were practicing. But
it was clear from the start that Drew was not
likely to survive. His torso had been crushed and he
had a serious brain injury. He died at ten ten

(36:18):
a m. On April first, nineteen fifty, at the age
of forty five, about an hour and a half after
arriving at the emergency room. His cause of death was
listed as one brain injury to internal hemorrhage, lungs three
multiple extremities injuries. Almost immediately, rumors started to spread that

(36:39):
Charles Drew had died not because his injuries were too severe,
but because he had been denied care or refused blood
because of his race. Within a couple of years, this
belief was widespread. It came up again and again in
everything from profiles of doctor Drew, to news reporting about
developments in blood banking technology, even to a ninety three

(37:01):
episode of the TV show Mash. It is an innately
believable story, not just because of the bitter irony of
a doctor who developed blood banking dying because he was
refused blood, but also because black people really did die
after being refused care at whites only hospitals, or turned
away because all the beds that a hospital had set

(37:22):
aside for black patients were often full. Multiple black doctors
who were there at the hospital when Charles Drew died
actively tried to dispel this rumor. They recognized that it
reflected the realities of being a black person seeking medical
treatment in the United States, but they also found it

(37:43):
to be disrespectful to the doctors who had tried to
save Drew's life and damaging to the medical system. Especially
in the South, people cited it as a reason not
to donate blood, like why do it if they're not
going to give it to black patients. This room were
also made it harder to recruit black doctors to practice

(38:03):
in North Carolina, something that was already challenging, giving the
racism and racist violence that a black doctor could expect
to encounter while practicing there See Mason Quick said of
all this quote, I'm a black man and this is
my state. I know you can indict North Carolina for
a number of things, but you can't indict her for this.

(38:24):
Although Charles Drew is most remembered for his role in
the development of blood banking, as we said earlier, he
really considered the training of black surgeons to be his
life's work. He trained more than half of the black
surgeons who were certified in the US between nineteen forty
one and his death in nineteen fifty. Many more who
were certified after his death had been through part of

(38:47):
their training under his guidance. Today, there are multiple schools
named after Charles Drew, including the Charles AR Drew University
of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, which is a
historically black university that was found did In nineteen sixty six,
a memorial marker was installed at the site of his
car crash in and in he was inducted into the

(39:09):
National Inventor's Hall of Fame. His death was enormously tragic.
His children, we're all little still at that point, and
there's it was just a huge loss for the medical
community in general, and the black medical community, especially especially
at Howard. I also feel like there will be folks,

(39:31):
including myself, who see a parallel between the Red Crosses
exclusion of black donors during World War Two and the
exclusion of of men who have sex with men today,
with a key difference which that there was originally a
reason to do that, which is, in the early days

(39:53):
of the AIDS crisis, there was no test, like there
wasn't a way to test the blood, and so with
the knowledge that HIV was disproportionately spreading among men who
have sex with men and no way to test the blood,
like that policy made sense. It is not a Red
a Red Cross policy, like I feel like the Red

(40:13):
Cross gets a lot of criticism for it, but it's
an FDA rule. The situation now, though, is totally different
from what it was in the nineteen eighties. There are
still a lot of different groups who see disproportionately higher
risks for blood born illnesses. But we do have reliable
tests now, we have had them for many, many, many years,

(40:35):
and so this blanket exclusion is really discriminatory. At this point,
and it's something that should have been really reassessed a
long time ago, and there is currently a study that's
going on right now to try to figure out a
better way to assess an individual person's actual risk for
blood born diseases, rather than having this blanket exclusion of

(41:00):
men who have sex with men, which I think at
this point is like a three month deferral, not a
lifetime ban as it was originally back in the eighties
when it was instituted. Well, you might talk more about
that on Friday. Yeah, I wanted to note it now
just because I know there will be folks who were like, Hey, this,
Why didn't they mention it? That seems big? Uh? Do

(41:23):
you also have listener mail for us? I do? I
actually have a very quick comment from Facebook from sharene
I hope I have said that correctly. Who said great episode.
Regarding our penicillin episode, it reminded me of my great
aunt's story from World War Two. She was a nurse
serving in the U. S. Army in England. One day

(41:44):
a serviceman came into the hospital with a sexually transmitted
disease and he thought he was going to die. The
nurses hooked him up to a large bag of penicillin.
He survived his ordeal, and after the war wrote to
the nurses that cared for him, thanking them and sharing
that he had been I'm a priest. Then there's a
smiley emoji. My great aunt always said penicillin was a

(42:05):
miracle drug and was so grateful for its use during
the war and after thanks for sharing the history. Thank
you so much for leaving us this comment UM, mostly
because we said in that episode that there was a
whole sort of debate about um about when best to
use penicillin during the war, whether it was better to

(42:27):
get people who had a minor illness or sexually transmitted
infection back two duty for people who were more grievously
injured and wanted to be going home into having a
somebody had a personal connection to that thought. That's interesting.
So if you would like to send us a note.
Where a history podcast that I Heart radio dot com.
We're also all over social media ad miss in History,

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