Charles Drew: Banked Plasma, Blood for Britain and a Segregated Red Cross

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Charles R. Drew was born in 1904 in Washington, D.C., grew up in Foggy Bottom, and as a boy delivered more than a thousand newspapers a day. After Dunbar High School and an athletic scholarship to Amherst, he spent two years at Morgan College in Baltimore as a chemistry and biology professor, athletic director and head football coach to pay for medical school. Rejected by Howard and deferred by Harvard, he went to McGill in Montreal, graduated second of 127 in 1933, and began studying shock with John Beattie. At Columbia his thesis, Banked Blood, showed that plasma separated by centrifuge could last two months, and in 1940 he became the first African American to earn a Doctor of Science in Medicine there.

Recruited by John Scudder, Drew ran the Blood for Britain project, then became director of the first American Red Cross blood bank in February 1941. When the Army and Navy first refused Black donors and then ordered their blood labeled and stored separately, Drew called the policy scientifically baseless and resigned in 1942. He died after a car crash on April 1, 1950, on his way to a free clinic in Tuskegee, and the episode separates the facts of that night from the enduring myth that a whites-only hospital turned him away.

• Why stored whole blood spoils and how ruptured red cells release potassium that can stop a heart
• Blood for Britain's numbers: almost 15,000 donors and more than 5,500 vials of plasma shipped across the Atlantic in five months
• Drew's refrigerated mobile donation stations, the forerunner of today's bloodmobile
• His lifelong exclusion from the District of Columbia chapter of the AMA despite his achievements
• Survivor John Ford's account from Alamance General Hospital, and why the myth repeated on MASH felt so believable