In honor of Black History Month, this month’s column highlights Dr. Charles Drew, a groundbreaking medical researcher whose innovations in blood storage and transfusion, transformed modern medicine. He broke barriers in a racially divided America to become one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.
Dr. Charles Drew was born into a middle-class African American family in 1904. His father worked as a carpet installer and his mother was a teacher. Charles and his siblings grew up in the Foggy-Bottom neighborhood of Washington DC. After completing Dunbar High School in DC, he attended Amherst College on an athletic scholarship, earning his degree in 1926. For the next two years, he worked as a professor of chemistry and biology at what is now Morgan State University to earn money for medical school.
Drew decided to attend McGill University Medical School in Montreal, Canada. While at McGill, he developed an interest in the correlation between blood transfusion and the body’s entering shock after losing a substantial amount of blood.
He graduated second in a class of 127 in 1933. He went on to become a faculty Instructor for pathology at Howard University and later began graduate work at Columbia University in New York on the award of a two-year Rockefeller Fellowship in surgery. It was at Columbia that he authored his Doctoral Thesis, “Banked blood: A study on Blood preservation.”
His research led to his appointment as Director of the first American Red Cross blood bank. He invented blood mobiles, which supplied blood to the US Army and Navy during WWII, allowing medics to save thousands of Allied forces’ lives during the war. Dr. Drew had a lengthy research and training career at Freedman’s Hospital and Howard University, both as a surgeon and professor of Medicine beginning in 1942.
Dr Drew and three African American Physicians attended a Medical Conference at Tuskegee Institute in March of 1950. Tragically, after a long night in the operating theater, Dr. Drew lost control of his vehicle – an accident attributed to fatigue – while driving near Burlington, North Carolina. His three passengers received minor injuries, but Dr Drew died from severe trauma and blood loss 30 minutes after first receiving medical attention; he was 45 years old.
Today, more than twenty-five educational and healthcare institutions bear his name – an enduring testament to the millions of lives touched by his groundbreaking contributions to medicine.
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