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Dorothy Lavinia Brown

Vance Hunter Marchbanks

Daniel Hale Williams

Louis T. Wright

Great Lives from History: African Americans

Charles R. Drew

by Janet Ober Berman

Scientist, researcher, and surgeon

As the inventor of modern protocols for blood products and plasma storage, Drew’s innovations are used worldwide on a daily basis for blood transfusions. He was the first African American surgeon to earn a doctorate of science degree. Drew fought racial discrimination by dispelling the notion that people of different races could not accept blood transfusions from each other.

Areas of achievement: Education; Invention; Medicine

Early Life

Charles Richard Drew was born to parents Richard, a carpet layer, and Nora Burrell Drew, a teacher turned stay-at-home mother. He was the eldest of five siblings in a middle-class family. His parents emphasized the importance of education. After his sister died of tuberculosis, Drew decided to enter the medical profession.

As a child, Drew had a talent for athletics and stood out academically. He played on four athletic teams at Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C.—football, baseball, track and field, and basketball—which won him the James E. Walker Memorial Medal for outstanding all-around athlete. Drew was awarded an athletic scholarship to Amherst College, whose student body was mostly white. At Amherst College he continued to excel in sports, being named an all-American halfback, and in his academic classes.

Upon graduation in 1926, Drew accepted a biology teaching position as well as athletic directorship at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. He remained at the university for two years and subsequently entered medical school in 1928 at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. While in medical school, Drew was named captain of the track team, awarded the annual prize in neuroanatomy, and was ranked in the top five of his graduating class. Drew’s anatomy professor, Dr. John Beattie, introduced him to ongoing research dilemmas with blood type compatibility. Beattie was studying problems involving blood transfusions. Drew’s interest in the topic proved influential in his future career path. After graduation in 1933, he remained in Canada for internship and residency in internal medicine at Royal Victoria and Montreal General Hospital.

Life’s Work

After his residency, Drew became a faculty member at Howard University Medical School and taught pathology. He also was an assistant surgeon at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. His chairman, Edward Lee Howes, was white. Because a stipulation of the Rockefeller Foundation’s grant funding for the departments of Medicine and Surgery stated that an African American must take over the chairmanship in five years, Howes mentored Drew as a surgical resident for this role. Drew further pursued a residency in surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. His supervisors, Dr. Allen Whipple and Dr. John Scudder, further guided Drew in research therapies involving blood products.

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While at Columbia University, Drew earned his doctorate in medical sciences (1940). His dissertation focused on how blood was stored in blood banks and the attempt to improve storage of plasma (the portion of blood that does not contain red blood cells) for a longer usage period. Drew made the groundbreaking discovery that plasma can be stored and dried for a long period of time without compromising its components, thus enabling more successful blood transfusions.

Drew’s research at Columbia on blood products led him to be chosen as supervisor for the blood-plasma division of New York City’s Blood Transfusion Association and awarded a grant to open a blood bank at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. As World War II began, he was appointed director of the blood bank for the American Red Cross. Drew created a system that kept track of blood donor volunteers and centralized the collection of donations. He eventually resigned from the directorship because of racial discrimination; at the time, black and white blood banks were separated, but there was no medical basis for this. While Drew fought to have blood and blood products collected from African Americans, it remained a policy of the American Red Cross that the blood had to be labeled by racial origin.

In 1942, Drew was appointed head of the Department of Surgery at Howard University and chief surgeon at Freedmen’s Hospital. In 1944, he was promoted to hospital chief of staff and medical director. He remained in the positions for four years. In 1943 Drew became the first African American surgeon to serve as an examiner for the American Board of Surgery. He was a member of the International College of Surgeons (1946) and became a consultant for the U.S. Army’s European Theater of Operations (1949).

Drew fought racial discrimination throughout his short career. He was unable to gain membership in the American Medical Association (AMA), as the decision from the District of Columbia was to not accept African American members. He was only able to become a fellow in the American College of Surgeons posthumously, even though at the time that he was alive there were two African American members of the society.

Drew died at age forty-five in an automobile accident while traveling home from a medical meeting at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He fell asleep while driving and suffered extensive head and internal injuries. A rumor emerged that Drew did not receive a blood transfusion because of racial discrimination, but his family and historians confirmed that this was not the case.

In 1966, the Charles R. Drew Postgraduate Medical School opened in California. The U.S. Postal Service created a postage stamp in 1981 in his honor as part of the Great Americans series.

Significance

Drew’s contribution to the medical profession cannot be overstated; his techniques on the storage of plasma for blood transfusions are used every day by hospitals worldwide and have saved countless numbers of individuals involved in traumas, wars, accidents and other injuries. Without this research and his determination to standardize blood banking, individuals would have continued to die while waiting for blood transfusions. Drew always stood true to his convictions and fought racial discrimination throughout his career, knowing there was no medical reason to separate blood products by race. Although he was unsuccessful in his time, his research paved the way for current methods that no longer segregate blood products.

Further Reading

1 

Gordon, Ralph C. “Charles R. Drew: Surgeon, Scientist, and Educator.” Journal of Investigative Surgery 18, no. 5 (September, 2005): 223-225. Historical account of Drew’s career from a medical perspective, including details on his medical school and residency training and professional accomplishments.

2 

Love, S. One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Details the racial discrimination that Drew faced over the course of his career and dispels rumors about his death.

3 

Trice, Linda. Charles Drew: Pioneer of Blood Plasma. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. Describes how Drew became the leader in blood banking and storage of plasma and his struggles along the way.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Berman, Janet Ober. "Charles R. Drew." Great Lives from History: African Americans, edited by Carl L. Bankston, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLAA_126055596738.
APA 7th
Berman, J. O. (2011). Charles R. Drew. In C. L. Bankston (Ed.), Great Lives from History: African Americans. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Berman, Janet Ober. "Charles R. Drew." Edited by Carl L. Bankston. Great Lives from History: African Americans. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.