History's Secret Heroes: Series 2: Charles Drew and the Blood Bank

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The 1st of July 1916, the Battle of the Somme.

British infantrymen advanced on German trenches.

They were met with machine gun fire.

57,000 men were injured or killed.

It was the greatest blood loss of the First World War.

Darkening splashes on ruined masonry, white bandages staining crimson, the earth of battlefields soaked in the life force of dying men, churned soil later bringing forth blood-red poppies.

Yet this story is not about bloodshed as tragedy.

It's about blood as salvation.

Faced with the incredible loss of blood in the First World War, doctors pioneered transfusions on the battlefield.

It was during the Second World War, though, that they refined and began to perfect the science and practice of treating the injured with blood.

One extraordinary American doctor led the creation and use of blood banks, saving countless lives both in war and in peacetime afterwards.

Dr.

Charles Drew was a groundbreaking surgeon and researcher in the field of blood transfusion.

Though Drew was a scientist and avoided politics, politics did not avoid him.

He was African American, living at a time when segregation was still rife in the United States.

An individual's ancestry may determine their blood type, but what we call race doesn't matter as long as the donor and recipient's blood types are compatible.

Even during the emergency of the Second World War, though, there were those who believed race segregation must be enforced, not just on buses or in hotels, but even in the blood flowing through soldiers' veins.

While he worked around the clock to save lives, Drew would be dragged into a battle on a different front: the battle for civil rights and racial equality in the United States.

I'm Helena Bonham Carter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance, and courage from World War II.

Charles Drew and the Blood Bank.

He was getting ready to go on a trip, probably probably to a conference out of the city or something,

and I didn't want him to go.

Sylvia Ivy Drew has one vivid memory of her father, Charles Richard Drew.

So he had his suitcase and he was ready to go out the door and I grabbed him.

I was so short that I could only get my arms around his legs at some point.

I don't know, you know, above the knee.

And I hugged him with all my might and said, please don't go.

Please stay.

Please stay.

And he had to unwind me and he had to go.

He was like a man in a hurry.

Charlene Drew Jarvis is Sylvia Ivey's elder sister.

I do remember once when I was out in front of the house on College Street, I cut my foot.

It was bleeding badly enough that my mother called my dad, put me in a little red wagon to take me to the hospital.

Charlene Drew can still see that image of her father, six foot four, rushing to heal her wound.

Walking from the hospital with a great pace with his white coat flowing in the back and his tie flowing to the side and that's the man in a hurry that I remember as a child and I think that's something that went right into the work which he did.

The man in the hurry, Charles Richard Drew, was born in 1904.

He grew up in the neighborhood of Washington, D.C., known as Foggy Bottom, for the heavy mists that hung over the Potomac River.

The Drew family were were African American.

Washington, D.C.

had a number of segregation laws in the early 20th century, and they were rigidly enforced.

Certain recreational facilities, hotels and public schools were reserved for white patrons only.

Drew's mother, who had trained as a schoolteacher, was determined that her children would receive a first-class education.

Initially, though Drew's academic performance was solid, he shone most brightly as an athlete.

In his high school yearbook, he was described as ambitious, popular, athletic, sturdy.

The quotation underneath Drew's photograph reads, you can do anything you think you can.

My father never, never

thought

that he was not going to be able to achieve the outcomes that he wanted, and that's the way he was raised.

In 1919, the global pandemic of influenza spread across the United States.

Tragedy struck the Drew family when Charles' sister Elsie developed complications after contracting the flu.

And his beloved sister Elsie had died of tuberculosis.

And that was devastating to him and probably one of the incentives that led him to medicine.

Drew won a sports scholarship to Amherst College in Massachusetts.

There were incidents when he played football and when they went to another college to play and where he was not allowed to eat with the other members of the team.

Drew set his sights on training to be a surgeon.

In the United States though, most medical schools refused black students.

Drew looked abroad and instead began his medical studies at McGill University in Montreal.

By the late 1930s, Drew was back in the United States, undertaking postgraduate study at Columbia University.

Its Presbyterian hospital had been founded to serve the poor of New York without regard to race, creed, or colour.

Despite this, Drew was the first African-American to earn a doctorate of medical science at Columbia.

It was assumed by some when he arrived that he would be working in the laboratory backstage rather than tending directly to patients.

He was at times advised because he was a very fair-skinned African-American that in order not to identify himself he need not sit with the others of color.

My father would never make that decision.

Drew had long been interested in transfusion medicine and at Columbia he worked specifically on an experimental blood bank.

His doctoral dissertation focused on improving blood preservation and storage.

In fact, it was called Banked Blood.

It begins with quite a detailed insight into the history of blood transfusion, but also early efforts to bank blood, particularly in the Soviet Union.

Roderick Bailey is a research fellow in the history of medicine at the University of Oxford.

Human blood transfusions had been taking place in a simple form since the early 19th century.

These were arm-to-arm transfusions.

So that is from a living donor straight into the casualty.

Connected by a tube, it's as simple as that.

You have somebody who's still lying next to the other person and delivering blood from one to the other.

Sometimes that blood was put into a container because once blood is out of the body, it will immediately start to coagulate.

And coagulated blood is not good for you.

At this point, the science of blood was rudimentary.

The existence of different blood groups, A, B, A, B, and O, was defined by the Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner at the beginning of the 20th century.

Eventually, this work would win him a Nobel Prize, yet it took time for his ideas to be accepted with perilous consequences.

Blood transfusion was a complete lottery, and there was no real understanding of why

if you give blood to one person, they're absolutely fine, and why you give blood to somebody else,

they react in such a way that that can be visually quite distressing in terms of sweating,

shaking,

but also ultimately sometimes lead to death.

1914, the First World War.

On the battlefields of Northwest Europe, advanced weaponry was injuring and killing soldiers at an unprecedented rate.

More deaths were as a consequence of hemorrhage, blood loss from gunshot wounds, from shellfire injuries.

You have small teams of surgeons and medical assistants trying to save the lives of a constant flood of often horrifically injured soldiers being brought in covered in blood, dying on the table, dying outside, dying while waiting.

During the First World War, the science of blood transfusion began to develop in response to need.

A Belgian scientist worked out how to prevent coagulation.

Instead of arranging difficult, direct donor-to-donor transfusions to treat injured soldiers, this meant blood could be delivered in bottles and stored.

Though transfusion remained relatively rare, British, American, and Canadian doctors pioneered its use in the field.

After the war, medical scientists began to look at the applications for this new technology in civilian medicine.

There were many cases in which blood transfusions could potentially save lives, treating hemorrhages during childbirth, victims of early car accidents, or workers caught up in industrial or agricultural accidents.

Fatality rates could be drastically reduced with the help of blood transfusions.

Drew's banked blood thesis, completed in spring 1940, pulled together research on blood preservation and storage.

After completing his formal medical training in New York in June 1940, he accepted an offer to become an assistant professor of surgery at Howard, a historically black university back in Washington, D.C.

Across the Atlantic though, Europe was at war.

The president of the Blood Transfusion Betterment Association sent an urgent cable to Drew in Washington.

They came to him and said, we need your help.

The association was trying to arrange a humanitarian program called Blood for Britain.

And the idea was that blood supplies would be sent to Britain to assist them with their casualty treatment in the war against Nazi Germany.

The British were already collecting blood, but they were concerned that they may not have enough to deal with the scale of wartime casualties.

Many in the United States were willing to help.

Part of that was a humanitarian impulse and partly though there was an understanding that this was the sort of thing that the US itself might have to be faced with at some points in the not too distant future.

Drew, by now 36 years old, led the technical aspects of the project as its medical director.

Here was a man who was extremely accomplished in what he'd achieved already in just his short period of studies and professional work.

work, what mattered were the skills and knowledge that he had to offer at this really critical moment.

Even so, collecting blood on this scale would prove to be an enormous task for Drew.

It was fraught with problems.

One was to find the blood itself.

Where do you get your raw material from?

And nothing like that had been attempted in the United States at that point.

And the second challenge...

major challenge was once you have that blood how on earth do you get it across the atlantic in a shape that's still fit to use?

There was no room for error.

Blood is a very fragile commodity.

It is a dangerous commodity if handled incorrectly.

You can kill people if you transfuse them with blood that is contaminated.

So how do you go about securing the right kind of blood safely from a large number of people?

And Drew is at the heart of understanding how that was done.

While Drew was working out how to deliver blood on this unprecedented scale, he was also struggling with being away from his family.

Drew had married Lenore Robbins, a home economics professor, in September 1939.

Their first child had been born the following summer, just as Drew was embarking on the Blood for Britain program.

While Drew worked from New York, his wife remained in Washington.

At times, the physical distance felt unbearable, as he expressed in some of his letters.

Dear Lenore, our separation has caused us to miss much that we may have shared together.

For this I am sorry.

Many of the days and nights have been lonely for me.

I know they were much more lonely for you.

But from time immemorial, men who have beat out new paths into the unknown regions have had to strike out alone, leaving all that was dear behind.

These have been new paths that I have been treading, Lenore, as new as the unchartered seas that the early sailors defied.

As strange as the new lands earlier explorers mapped, while good wives waited in fear and loneliness lest the wandering ones failed to return.

Devotedly, Charlie.

At work, Drew was developing methods to gather blood from multiple hospitals around New York.

Great care had to be taken to avoid contamination, not only in the extraction of blood, but also in its storage, preservation and transport.

Very quickly, it was decided that plasma would be the best product to send because it lasts longer than blood.

Plasma is the fluid that carries red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets around the body.

It makes up approximately 55% of the blood.

It can be refrigerated and stored.

It would be safer to send because it wouldn't go off quite so quickly and could therefore withstand hopefully the lengthy journey journey from the United States across the Atlantic to Britain.

The first batch of plasma was soon on its way to Britain.

When it arrived though, there was a problem.

The plasma appeared cloudy.

And they found, unfortunately, that a high degree of contamination occurred in the process as they were trying to take blood from the donors, but particularly try to store it as plasma.

By the time the project concluded in January 1941, no American blood or plasma had been used in Britain.

Though the bombing was significant, the invasion never came and the casualties that they suffered were not at the level that they had initially feared.

But really the main reason why the British didn't use it is that they had enough of their own by that stage, so they were self-sufficient in blood.

Nevertheless, Drew had proved that it was possible to gather blood from hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of months.

Converted into plasma, this blood could be stored and preserved and would last for several weeks in transit.

Drew had also standardized the equipment and techniques used for drawing blood across all hospitals taking part.

This was a significant enough achievement to secure him a new role of director of the American Red Cross's Blood Bank.

By February 1941, the United States was making its own preparations for the possibility that it too might enter the war.

Drew began a pilot program in the New York region, harvesting blood and turning it into a new product, dried plasma.

Essentially, you're left with a powder which then requires rehydrating with sterile water, distilled water, and that's it.

That's all you need.

Once rehydrated, dry plasma could be used in the same way as fresh, wet plasma.

Crucially though, dried plasma did not require refrigeration.

On a battlefield, this made it far more practical.

Owing to his work on Blood for Britain, Drew was now an expert in recruiting new blood donors.

And I think he's on record as having participated in, well, mobile visits, trucks to outlying areas to collect blood from donors, which was then brought to hospitals and then transformed into plasma.

And that was the first time that had been done in the United States.

The mobile trucks that pulled up at department stores or industrial plants could perform mass collections of blood.

That donated blood could then be made available for emergencies, for surgeries, and for treating the kinds of injuries that would previously have been fatal.

Drew's programme was hailed as a triumph.

In the Pacific theatre, blood and plasma were used in some of the bloodiest battles of the war.

There, the technology and practice pioneered by Drew would help save countless lives.

Yet, in November 1941, the American Red Cross, acting under the direction of the Surgeon General of the United States Army and Navy, announced a policy that would pull Drew into a political debate.

New blood banks were opening in cities across America, collecting blood from scores of patriotic donors who were keen to help the Allied cause.

But black people who wanted to donate were turned away.

Racial thinking at the time said that African Americans should not be blood donors.

My father himself could not have been a blood donor.

He was doing pioneering work to figure out how to save lives.

He was not doing pioneering work to save only the lives of people who could be distinguished by race.

At first, Drew's position on the matter was quiet indignation.

He wasn't a marcher, he wasn't a member of any of the advocacy groups, you know,

he didn't do a lot of political work,

but he knew as a matter of science that it was wrong to discriminate and not take blood from black donors.

In January 1942, after widespread criticism from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and from the Black Press, the American Red Cross altered its policy.

It announced, in deference to the wishes of those for whom the plasma is being processed, the blood will be processed separately so that those receiving transfusions may be given plasma from the blood of their own race.

Unfortunately, this meant the policy had changed from one of complete exclusion to another scientifically unsound position, blood segregation.

My father continued to object to that, saying that there was no scientific reason for the separation of blood.

In interviews and public speeches, Drew began to speak out against the segregation of blood.

He joined a union-organized demonstration against segregation.

He said the science is what needs to be obeyed.

The science says that the blood of African Americans, white Americans is the same blood.

The blood of all people is the same blood.

So the notion that blood should be separated on the basis of race, he said, was simply anathema.

And he, in fact, said in a newspaper article, it was stupid, which I thought was curious because my father would never allow us to say that word.

The Red Cross continued to segregate blood throughout the Second World War.

In 1948, it finally ended the practice.

The modern American Red Cross said in 2023: We acknowledge that this donation policy was hurtful and recognize these actions contributed to continued mistrust and pain for black communities, where health disparities continue to be felt disproportionately.

Today, the Red Cross stands firm in its dedication to diversity and inclusivity and resoundingly rejects hate, racism and bigotry of any kind.

In April 1941, Drew returned to Howard University.

He wanted to be closer to his wife Lenore and their baby daughter, who they had named Bibi after the initials for Bloodbank.

In the coming years, they would have three more children, including Charlene and Sylvia Ivey.

Charlene found a letter written by her mother recalling how the Drew family observed D-Day in June 1944.

About 4.30 p.m., Charlie said, let's drive through the city and savor this historic day.

We climbed into the Ford.

The streets were full of cars.

We got in line that moved slowly down 14th Street in Washington.

The procession of cars moved so slowly.

Bells rang, whistles blew.

Honkers were cranked.

People yelled out of their car windows.

And so, she said, our family marked a day in American history.

After the war, in March 1950, Drew was serving as chairman of Howard University Medical School Surgery Department.

He was invited to attend a medical conference in Tuskegee, Alabama.

My mother had said to him, Charlie, it's too much to drive.

Why don't you take the train?

Drew refused.

He said he wanted to travel with three junior colleagues, his medical residents.

Driving was the cheapest way for them to get there.

He worked a very full day.

He had surgeries in the afternoon.

And the last thing at night, he had a student council banquet.

The car in which the four of them were driving, that is my dad and three of his residents, did not leave Washington, D.C.

until one o'clock in the morning.

One of the doctors later described the drive through the Virginia countryside as starry and moonlit.

The men talked all night.

Stopping at a motel or hotel was not an option for black people traveling through the segregated South in 1950.

So instead of

looking for a place to stay, in a time when they were very few, they continued to drive.

My father took the wheel at five o'clock in the morning,

and very shortly thereafter he fell asleep at the wheel.

The car that he was driving belonged to one of his residents.

The car flipped

and unfortunately my father was crushed.

Charles Drew was just 45 when he died.

In the following years, stories circulated in newspapers, magazines, and books of a terrible irony.

It was claimed that Drew had been denied a blood transfusion.

The story is that he was taken to a white hospital and they refused to treat him.

Not true.

The hospital that he was taken to, he was served in the basement because blacks were only served in the basement, but that was fine.

He got in and two surgeons knew him by his work.

There was such injury.

to his body that he could not have survived.

And so the question of whether he got a blood transfusion or plasma is really a moot one because the level of injuries from being crushed were such that he could not have survived.

You know, here was somebody who had done something inarguably useful for mankind.

And then when he needed help himself from the medical community, he was denied it.

So

it was an irony, it wasn't true, but it was an irony that people people will hold on to because it speaks the truth about the black experience in the United States.

And when I tell people that that is not true, that that is not the way he died, they get angry with me because I'm interfering with a deeply held

belief, a deeply held example.

of the wrongness of discrimination in the United States.

It was was true for many other black people.

They didn't get into hospitals.

You know, they were left on the road.

But it just wasn't true in his case.

As the field of blood science continued to advance through the later half of the 20th century, Dr.

Drew's wartime contribution remained pivotal.

Ultimately, his role is in laying the foundations for what came next, which for the United States was the capacity to collect, preserve, store blood for the purposes of transfusion, which had an enormous impact on its efficiency in saving its own lives later in the war.

Charlene Drew Jarvis looks back on the letters her father sent her mother while he was working on the Blood for Britain and Red Cross programmes.

She sees a man who made an incredible personal sacrifice for the advancement of science in wartime and an almost prophetic foreshadowing of his own fate.

And the last line of that letter said that there were explorers who mapped while good wives waited in fear and loneliness lest the wandering ones failed to return.

He failed to return, but he left a legacy.

And of that I am tremendously proud.

The crisis of World War II gave him the opportunity to rise to the occasion and

use his skills as a physician, as a scientist, as an organizer of people

to meet the challenge of the moment.

Next time on history's Secret Heroes, a 24-year-old Belgian woman masterminds an escape line.

spanning 800 miles of Nazi-occupied territory, stretching from Belgium to Spain.

She said that she would make this trip regularly, bringing Allied airmen who are now often parachuting out of crippled bombers over Belgium.

Andre de Jean and the Comet Line.

Have you ever wondered why you see what you see when you're online?

I'm Jamie Bartlett, and in The Gatekeepers from BBC Radio 4, I'm telling the story of how social media accidentally conquered the world.

Mark's explained to me he's going for a billion users.

I'm going, for what?

I'm sorry, what is it you're gonna do?

They can give us a voice or silence us, whoever we are.

At RealDonald Trump, it says, account suspended, everything has been sort of wiped off.

To understand how we got here and where it's taking us, listen to The Gatekeepers with me, Jamie Bartlett.

Listen first on BBC Sounds.

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