BallPoint: Charles Richard Drew, MD

BallPoint
By Allen Ball

Charles Richard Drew, MD
If we take care of education, race will take care of itself-- Charles R. Drew

I first heard of Charles R. Drew in an episode of the popular TV show M.A.S.H. Because North Carolina was mentioned in the program, in a negative way, I researched the life of Dr. Drew, discovering that the writers of the show wittingly, or unwittingly, were perpetuating a myth about a "whites only" hospital in North Carolina.

Charles Richard Drew was born June 3, 1904, in his grandmother's house in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Stevens Elementary School and entered Paul Laurence Dunbar High, the best black college-preparatory school in the country, quickly becoming a four-letter man--a star in football, basketball, baseball, and track. Drew captained a high school cadet corps and twice received the James E. Walker medal as the school's best all-around athlete.

In the early 1900s, medicines we now take for granted were unavailable. After World War I a global epidemic of influenza took 20 million lives. Two years later, Charlie watched his sister, Elsie, die of another disease, tuberculosis. Though only fifteen, he imagined himself becoming a doctor.

Often neglectful in his schoolwork, his parents insisted that he study harder and he did, especially his favorite subjects -- biology and math. His effort paid off because, at graduation, in 1922, he was awarded a partial scholarship to, predominantly white, Amherst College in Massachusetts.

From the beginning, Drew focused more on sports than on academics. Incredibly fast, and breaking records as a sprinter and hurdle-jumper, he became the only freshman to win a major letter. His agility on the football field made him a celebrity.

Normally, Amherst students elected a man with Drew's ability to be captain of the football team. But two other talented black athletes had already been passed over. Now, so was Charles. After student protests, he was voted captain of the track team and later acknowledged as Amherst's most valuable player, receiving the Thomas W. Ashley Trophy.

Despite the honors, his experience with the track team was indelibly ensconced in Drew's mind. After a competition with Brown University, the Amherst team planned to have dinner at the Narragansett Hotel, but the hotel manager refused to serve "colored boys." The track coach suggested that the four black team members dine on Brown's campus instead. The road home that night was "long and silent."

Even with his scholarship and part-time jobs, Charles had accumulated debts. Medical school would have to wait until he paid bills and saved enough to pay his way. Thus, for the next two years, he taught biology and chemistry and coached at Morgan College, a small black college in Baltimore, Maryland.

Later, to his surprise, Howard University rejected his application to medical school because he lacked two credits in English. Instead, they offered him a job as assistant football coach.

Angry and hurt -- they had not even suggested that he make up the work -- Drew declined the job. He told his brother Joe: "Someday I'll come back and run this place."

Weeks later, McGill University in Montreal, Canada, unlike other schools, did not ask what race he belonged to and accepted him into their five-year medical program.

In 1933, Drew graduated with degrees of doctor of medicine and master of surgery. He also won the Williams Prize, given to the best senior in the class. He then interned at the Montreal General and Royal Victoria hospitals, where he honed his surgical skills and continued to research the preservation of blood.

Toward the end of his residency he applied to teach pathology at Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C. It's clinic was connected to Howard Medical School. This time Howard accepted him willingly. His starting salary was $150 a month, slightly more than he had earned as a paperboy.

Drew returned to Washington, D.C., in 1937, just before America emerged from the Great Depression. Across the sea, the German dictator Adolf Hitler was arming his country for war.

In the mid-1930s, a second world war loomed in Europe. Dr. Drew realized that blood would be crucial for treating the wounded. So, along with all his responsibilities, he continued to research the storage of blood.

Studying with Dr. John Scudder, he worked on the chemistry of blood and its use in transfusions. His vast knowledge of blood experiments, done in the Soviet Union and at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, became invaluable to Scudder's project.

At this time, most blood was transfused from one live body to another. Whole blood was spoiled quickly even when refrigerated. Scudder and Drew were determined to find a safe way to preserve blood.

Charles Drew, accustomed to working long hours, began his days early and ended near midnight. He began to study plasma, the yellowish liquid in blood, because it contained hundreds of elements necessary to life. One was fibrinogen, a protein that caused blood to clot.

Mid-year, Drew decided to work toward a doctorate of science. No black doctor had ever earned this degree.

His original research led to an invitation to speak at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. On the way to the conference, Charles stopped in Atlanta, Georgia, to visit with his college buddy, Mercer Cook. At a candlelit dinner, Mercer introduced him to Minnie Lenore Robbins, an attractive teacher who taught home economics at Spelman College. Nearly thirty-five years old, Drew quickly fell in love.

Returning north from Alabama, three nights later, Drew stopped again in Atlanta. Hiring a cab, in the chilling night, he hurried to Lenore's dormitory and knocked loudly on her door until he woke her up and proposed to her. On September 23, 1939, the couple were married and moved into a modest apartment near Drew's laboratory.

Just prior to Charles's and Lenore's marriage, New York's Presbyterian Hospital started a blood bank program. Dr. Drew supervised the clinical testing. Exactly a year after the blood bank opened, Lenore gave birth to their first child, "Bebe" Roberta. Her nickname stood for blood bank.

In the fall, German bombs blitzed Great Britain night and day. Cities crumbled as thousands died and thousands more were wounded. On September 1, 1940, Drew received a cable from John Beattie, his teacher-friend from McGill. Now a director at England's Royal College of Surgeons. Beattie asked:


COULD YOU SECURE FIVE THOUSAND AMPULES

DRIED PLASMA FOR TRANSFUSION WORK IMME-

DIATELY AND FOLLOW THIS BY EQUAL QUANTI-

TY IN THREE OR FOUR WEEKS.

That quantity of plasma, Drew believed, did not exist in the world, however; he was determined not to let his friend down.

Howard University granted Dr. Drew a leave and within weeks he returned to New York City as medical supervisor of the "Blood for Britain" program.

He brought blood donors together at one location, recruiting them through radio announcements, billboards, newspapers, and subway posters. During the first five months of the program, 14,566 people up to give blood. After Drew's small well-trained staff tested and sterilized the blood at Columbia's Presbyterian Hospital, it was sent to England.

When the British began to fill their own needs, Drew's program ended; he now shifted his concern to finding a way to mass-produce plasma. He and his staff solved the problem by drying plasma. It could then be turned back into liquid plasma by mixing it with water. Dried plasma could now be shipped in safe packages to wherever it was needed.

In 1941, the U.S. War Department created a policy of blood segregation, which the American Red Cross accepted. The Army ordered the collection of Caucasian blood only. Black soldiers did, however, sometimes give blood for each other within black units. Drew asked that the order be rescinded, but his request was denied.

Respected as he was for his work with plasma, even he did not qualify as a donor. Feeling that this rule insulted his people, he called a press conference. Speaking as a scientist, he told reporters, "The blood of individual human beings may differ by grouping, but there is absolutely no scientific basis for any difference according to race."

In April 1941, Drew resigned from his post with the Red Cross. That same month he received his surgeon's certificate from the American Board of Surgery.

Months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Drew learned that plasma had helped save the lives of thousands of servicemen and civilians.

After returning to Howard University, Drew began to receive many awards -- from Tuskegee, the E.S. Jones award (1943), an honorary degree from Virginia State (1945), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Spingarn Medal, in 1944. This prestigious medal is given to a black American who contributes the most to humankind. In 1944 Charles also became chief-of-staff at Freedmen's Hospital.

He joined the American-Soviet Committee on Science (1943) and became a fellow of the International Surgeons (1946). He also served on many boards, among them, the National Society of Crippled Children and a local chapter of the American Cancer Society. But Dr. Drew never became a member of the American Medical Association (AMA) because the Washington, D.C., chapter was segregated.

As Freedmen's chief surgeon, Drew represented the hospital at a number of medical conferences, including the annual free clinic at the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, which he had been attending since 1939. Shortly before the 1950 Tuskegee clinic took place, Drew decided to drive to Alabama rather than fly so he could travel with three other physicians -- Samuel Bullock, John Ford, and Walter Johnson -- and save some money.

The four men agreed to take turns driving Bullock's black Buick Roadmaster. They left Washington, D.C., on April Fool's Day -- a Saturday -- shortly after 2:00 A.M. Bullock was the first driver. Drew, who had spent most of the previous day and night on the operating room at Freedmen's and attending a Howard University student council meeting, volunteered for the second shift. He settled into the back seat and slept until it was time for him to drive.

Drew took his turn behind the wheel in the early morning hours, shortly after they reached Richmond, Virginia. He was driving the Roadmaster along North Carolina State Route 49 when, at close to 8:00 A.M., a few miles north of Haw River, the car began to veer off the road.

Charles had momentarily fallen asleep at the wheel. Bullock yelled out, "Hey, Charlie!" waking Drew, who immediately tried to regain control of the car. But it went off the road instead and continued its course into a field, where it turned over three times before landing right-side up.

When the car came to a stop, Johnson got out of the back seat and helped free Bullock, who was wedged against the dashboard. Like Johnson, he seemed to be all right. The only injury he had sustained was a cut hand. Ford had been thrown from the car, but he appeared to be in relatively good shape, too, suffering only a broken left arm.

Dr. Drew, however, had caught his fight foot under the brake pedal, so, instead of being thrown from the car, he had been trapped in such a way that the vehicle had rolled over him. When the others reached him, he was just barely alive. His left leg was nearly severed, and his body was in shock.

An ambulance arrived. The attendants put Drew inside and took him to the Alamance General Hospital, an old facility in the nearby town of Burlington. Three white doctors attempted to revive him. Their efforts included giving Drew a blood transfusion, but nothing they could do was of much help. Two of his veins that return blood to the right atrium of the heart had been badly damaged in the accident, causing him to hemorrhage internally.

About an hour and a half after he first received medical attention, Charles Drew died. He was 45 years old.

Schools and hospitals have been named after him. His portrait hands in the American Red Cross's national headquarters in Washington, D.C. Another portrait of Drew can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery and yet another in the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland. Unveiled in 1976, it marked the first time that a portrait of a black American was included in the institute's gallery of distinguished scientists.

That same year, the Charles R. Drew Commemorative Medal was established to honor exceptional achievements in the advancement of the medical education of black Americans and other minorities.

Another tribute came in 1981, when the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in honor of Drew's contribution to science.

Shortly after his funeral, a rumor began to spread that a whites-only hospital had refused to admit Charles because he was black. According to this story, America's pioneer in blood preservation subsequently bled to death.

Bullock, Ford, and Johnson -- the three black doctors who were at the hospital with Drew -- all stepped forward to dispute the rumor. "A conscientious effort was made to revive Dr. Drew," Johnson and the others claimed.

Nevertheless, the story of Drew bleeding to death was picked up by such periodicals as Time magazine and the New York Times, which was still reporting -- more than 30 years after the auto accident -- that "the segregated hospital to which he was taken had no plasma that might have saved his life."

The rumor was further perpetuated in the television comedy, M.A.S.H. In the popular TV series of the 1980s, Dr. Benjamin "Hawkeye" Pierce, played by Alan Alda, makes reference to Dr. Drew in one episode. A wounded American soldier in Korea, after being told he would have to undergo a blood transfusion, expressed concern to Pierce in the following dialogue.

Soldier: Make sure I get the right color blood, hey doc.

Pierce: (later) Ever hear of Dr. Charles Drew, Soldier?

Soldier: Who's that?

Pierce: Dr. Drew invented the process for separating

blood so that it could be stored.

B.J. Armstrong: Plasma.

Pierce: He died last April after a car accident in North Carolina.

Armstrong: He bled to death. The hospital wouldn't let him in.

Pierce: It was for whites only.

It is not known exactly when or where the myth surrounding the circumstances of Drew's death began. However, the rumor helped him emerge as a symbol to all black Americans whose civil rights have been restricted because of their skin color. Even today the myth adds fuel to the burning issue of equal opportunity.

A marker erected at the site of Drew's fatal accident in North Carolina features a bronze plaque that lists his many accomplishments. At the unveiling of the marker, in 1986, were his brother, Joseph; his daughter, Charlene, and his wife, Lenore.