Charles Richard Drew (June 3, 1904 – April 1, 1950) was an American surgeon and medical researcher. He researched in the field of blood transfusions, developing improved techniques for blood storage, and applied his expert knowledge to developing large-scale blood banks early in World War II. This allowed medics to save thousands of Allied forces' lives during the war.[1] As the most prominent African American in the field, Drew protested against the practice of racial segregation in the donation of blood, as it lacked scientific foundation, and resigned his position with the American Red Cross, which maintained the policy until 1950.[2]
Drew was born in 1904 into an African-American middle-class family in Washington, D.C.[3] His father, Richard, was a carpet layer[4] and his mother, Nora Burrell, trained as a teacher.[5] Drew and three (two sisters, one brother) of his four younger siblings (three sisters and one brother total) grew up in Washington's largely middle-class and interracial Foggy Bottom neighborhood.[5][3] From a young age Drew began work as a newspaper boy in his neighborhood, daily helping deliver over a thousand newspapers to his neighbors. Drew attended Washington's Dunbar High School which was well known for its equality and opportunities for all, despite the racial climate at the time.[6] From 1920 until his marriage in 1939, Drew's permanent address was in Arlington County, Virginia,[7] although he graduated from Washington's Dunbar High School in 1922 and resided elsewhere during that period of time.[5][8]
Drew won an athletics scholarship to Amherst College in Massachusetts,[9] where he played on the football as well as the track and field team, and later graduated in 1926.[6] After college, Drew spent two years (1926–1928) as a professor of chemistry and biology, the first athletic director, and football coach at the historically black private Morgan College in Baltimore, Maryland, to earn the money to pay for medical school.[5][10][11]
For his medical career Drew applied to Howard University, Harvard Medical School and later McGill University.[6] Drew lacked some prerequisites for Howard University, and Harvard wanted to defer him a year, so to begin medical school promptly, Drew decided to attend McGill's medical school in Montreal, Canada.[12]
It was during this stage in his medical journey that Drew worked with John Beattie, who was conducting research regarding the potential correlations between blood transfusions and shock therapy.[13] Shock occurs as the amount of blood in the body rapidly declines which can be due to a variety of factors such as a wound or lack of fluids (dehydration). As the body goes into shock, both blood pressure and body temperature decrease which then causes a lack of blood flow and a loss of oxygen in the body's tissues and cells. Eventually, it became clear that transfusions were the solution to treating victims of shock, but at the time there was no successful method of transportation or mass storage of blood, leaving transfusions to be extremely limited to location.[13]
At McGill, he achieved membership in Alpha Omega Alpha, a scholastic honor society for medical students, ranked second in his graduating class of 127 students, and received the standard Doctor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degree awarded by the McGill University Faculty of Medicine in 1933.[7][9]