Charles Drew (1904–1950)

Charles Richard Drew was an African American surgeon who helped improve blood transfusion practices during World War II and contributed to the development of modern-day blood banking. Sometimes called the Father of the Blood Bank, Drew showed that blood plasma, or the liquid component of blood, could be safely separated from whole blood, stored, and used for transfusion. Plasma has several advantages over whole blood, including that it can be stored safely for longer and transported over long distances. Drew’s methods allowed medics to treat thousands of injured Allied soldiers who were suffering from blood loss. Drew was also an advocate for racial desegregation in the United States and fought against the discriminatory blood donation practices of the American Red Cross. Drew’s work made blood transfusions safer and more accessible, which not only helped the Allied war effort in World War II, but also led to improvements in the treatment of complications during childbirth and efforts to reduce maternal mortality rates, particularly among Black women.

1. Early Life and Education
2. Blood Banking Research
3. The Red Cross and Segregation
4. Later Years
5. Legacy and Impact

Early Life and Education

Drew was born on 3 June 1904 in Washington, DC, to Nora Burell and Richard T. Drew. As a child, Drew worked as a newspaper boy, delivering newspapers around his neighborhood. He attended Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, and graduated in 1922. Drew attended Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, on an athletic scholarship as a pre-medicine major. He played for the school's football and track and field teams. In 1926, Drew graduated from Amherst. To save money for medical school, he worked for two years as both an instructor of chemistry and biology and athletics director and football coach at Morgan State University, which was then known as Morgan College, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Drew applied to several medical schools with mixed results. Howard University in Washington, DC, rejected Drew’s application because he was missing some prerequisites. Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, accepted him but deferred him for one year because they had a limited number of spots for African American students. Drew ultimately attend McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he joined Alpha Omega Alpha, a scholastic honor society for medical students. At McGill, Drew also received the annual scholarship prize in neuroanatomy, staffed the McGill medical journal, and won the J. Francis Williams prize in medicine after he completed an exam-based competition.

In 1933, Drew obtained his Doctor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degrees from McGill, graduating second in his class. During that year, the American Board of Medical Specialties began to provide a certification process for physicians to receive an extra credential in their field. Most physicians at that time did not become board-certified. In 1933, Drew joined the residency program at Montreal General Hospital in Montreal, which was necessary for him to become board-certified.

At Montreal General Hospital, Drew started working with John Beattie, a professor who was researching ways to use blood transfusions to treat blood shock. Blood shock occurs when the body does not have enough blood circulating because of blood loss or dehydration. As a result of shock, blood pressure, oxygen levels, and body temperature all decrease. When Drew joined Beattie’s lab, there was an issue with mass transportation and storage of blood. Physicians used whole blood from donors directly for people with shock. That method posed challenges of contamination, incompatible blood type, and a short storage time of two days. Drew saw firsthand the need for reliable blood storage. During his residency, a fire at the hospital left a number of patients badly burned and in need of more blood than was available.

After completing his residency at Montreal General Hospital in 1935, Drew began working as a pathology professor at Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, DC. During that time, the university was working to upgrade its residency program and create a fellowship program with the financial assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation, a philanthropic organization working in medical research, to further the medical training of student physicians. Howard hired white physicians to train their African American successors. Drew trained with Edward Lee Howes, the chair of the surgical department, for three years.

In 1938, Drew received a Rockefeller Fellowship to train with surgeon Allen O. Whipple at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, New York, which was the main teaching hospital associated with Columbia University’s medical school, the College of Physicians and Surgeons. The fellowship allowed Drew to advance his surgical career by training under Whipple for his surgical residency while also earning a doctorate at Columbia. In 1939, Drew met and married Minnie Lenore Robbins, a professor of home economics at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and they later had four children.

Blood Banking Research

For his doctoral research, Drew worked with John Scudder, a surgeon at Presbyterian Hospital who was researching fluid balance, blood chemistry, and blood transfusions. Drew’s project was devoted to understanding how to safely and effectively bank, or store, blood. For his dissertation, titled Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation, Drew assessed the blood and transfusion research to date and, working with Scudder, applied his findings to a trial blood bank program at Presbyterian. The experimental blood banking project they developed used blood plasma rather than whole blood for storage and preservation. Blood plasma is the liquid component of blood and is composed of proteins, hormones, water, and electrolytes. Drew developed techniques to separate whole blood into its substituent components, including blood plasma. Because plasma does not contain cells, it can be kept safely for years under frozen conditions. And though it does not contain oxygen, it can be used for transfusions to treat shock.

While working on his dissertation, became involved with a program called Blood for Britain. The Blood for Britain project was a short-term initiative that provided blood for Allied forces in Britain during a period when Germany was carrying out aerial bombings. Alongside Scudder and colleagues at the American Red Cross, Drew standardized methods of blood collection and implemented the method he developed in his dissertation for the collection and processing of plasma. That method involved using centrifugal and sedimentation techniques to extract the plasma from whole blood. Next, they would add a mercurial antiseptic to the collected sample to prevent bacterial contamination. Afterwards, they added a sterile solution to dilute the plasma and transferred it to a shipping container. The approach allowed physicians to store blood donations for up to one year, much longer than whole blood can be stored, which is two days.

Drew completed his residency program and obtained his doctoral degree in June of 1940 and returned to his faculty position at Howard just a few months before the first containers of plasma arrived in England, in August of 1940. In September of that year, the American Red Cross asked Drew to return to work on the Blood for Britain project, this time as its director. Drew oversaw the program until it concluded in January of 1941.

Following his work with Blood for Britain, Drew became director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank, which was sponsored by the American Red Cross and the National Research Council, and which was responsible to supplying blood to the US Army and Navy. As director, Drew helped establish uniform safety protocols and techniques in the collection and storage of blood plasma. Also under his watch, the American Red Cross introduced mobile blood collection locations, or Bloodmobiles, to expand the availability of blood and assist with blood shortages. At that time, the Allied medics needed blood to treat soldiers on the battlefield. The bloodmobiles allowed the Red Cross to collect millions of pints of blood to resolve shortages.

The Red Cross and Segregation

During the Blood for Britain effort and after, the Surgeon General of the United States and the Navy informed the American Red Cross that they would only accept blood from white donors. The American Red Cross complied and implemented regulations based on a donor's race. As an African American man, that policy put Drew in conflict with the same organization that employed him. He was unable to participate in a project he created due to the color of his skin.

In 1942, due to the increasing demand for blood during the war, the Red Cross modified its policy concerning the race of donors to allow African Americans to donate blood, but only under strict standards set by the Navy. The Navy standards stated that African Americans were able to donate blood in a segregated environment. Also, the collectors were to mark every pint of donated blood with the donor's race, and keep it segregated. The American Red Cross complied with the rule modification and stated it had no interest in trying to settle racial controversies. Once the modified rules took effect, American Red Cross officials stated that those who criticized the policy were unpatriotically attempting to cripple the blood donor service and thus harm the war effort itself.

The blood collection policies were a matter of disagreement between Drew and the American Red Cross. Drew made a public statement in which he called the policies unscientific and resigned from his position as director. Later, in a letter he wrote to Jacob Billikopf, a social worker and philanthropist, Drew criticized the government’s and the Red Cross’s policies. He stated the policies were wrong because no official department of the federal government should willfully humiliate its citizens. He added that there is no scientific basis for segregating blood by race and, moreover, the American Red Cross needed the blood.

Later Years

Drew passed his American Board of Surgery exams in 1941, and returned to Howard University Hospital, which was called Freedman's Hospital at that time, as Chief of Surgery. Also in 1941, Drew became one of the first African American examiners for the American Board of Surgery, a group that provided board certification for surgeons. For the next nine years, as a faculty member at Howard, Drew trained and mentored many medical students and surgical residents. In that position, he also campaigned against the exclusion of black physicians from medical societies, including the American Medical Association.

In 1950, Drew was due to attend a conference of African American Physicians in Tuskegee, Alabama. On his drive to the city with colleagues, the group died in a car crash on 1 April 1950 in Burlington, North Carolina. At the time of Drew’s death, rumors spread that a white physician denied him a blood transfusion, but, as of 2025, those rumors remain unfounded. Drew’s injuries were too severe to be treated with a blood transfusion.

Legacy and Impact

Throughout Drew’s professional career, he advocated for the desegregation of medical practices and the creation of an inclusive environment based on scientific reasoning rather than prejudice. The advances Drew made with blood transfusions made it possible for physicians to treat birth complications, such as hemorrhaging, through readily available plasma. His methods created a sterilized method of blood collection that helped avoid complications from unsterile blood-collection techniques. The practices Drew established contributed to the improvement of maternal health and a decrease in maternal mortality rates.

Drew’s scientific career earned him several prizes and honors. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People awarded him the Spingarn Medal in 1944. Drew received the Spingarn Medal for his blood plasma research and leadership role within the American Red Cross during World War II. In 1946, Drew became a fellow for the International College of Surgeons. In 1966, a medical school was also established in his honor. The Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, in Los Angeles, California, aims to create an inclusive medical field that provides everyone equal opportunities regardless of their race. The Black Maternal Health Center of Evolution is a subsection of the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science that aims to reduce Black maternal mortality rates by providing Black families with low-cost services within the maternal center in partnership with local organizations.

Drew Died on 1 April 1950, at the age of forty-five, in a car crash. 

Sources

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