Charles Drew and blood plasma banking

When Charles Drew, a surgeon on the Howard University faculty, came to Presbyterian Hospital in New York in 1938 for surgical training and a doctorate, blood banking was new. The first American hospital blood bank had opened at Chicago's Cook County Hospital in 1937, and there was no standard way to collect blood, keep it free of contamination or protect recipients. No African American physician had held a residency at Presbyterian, and the surgeon Allen Whipple placed Drew in John Scudder's laboratory, but Drew persuaded Whipple to train him as a resident as well.

In August 1939 Drew and Scudder opened an experimental blood bank at the hospital. Each donation had to be drawn with sterile equipment, anticoagulated, refrigerated, typed, tested for syphilis and tracked. The seven-month experiment became Drew's dissertation, Banked Blood, which earned him a doctor of medical science degree in June 1940.

Britain, under German bombing, needed plasma. The Blood Transfusion Betterment Association, the National Research Council and the American Red Cross organized Blood for Britain, and Drew drew up its plan with Scudder and E. H. L. Corwin. Each batch of plasma was cultured for bacteria, treated with merthiolate, retested and diluted with saline. The program opened on 16 August 1940. In September the association called Drew back from Howard as full-time medical supervisor; he standardized procedures, equipment and records across the hospitals and had one central laboratory check every batch. By January 1941 it had collected 14,556 donations and shipped more than 5,000 liters of plasma to England.

Drew then became assistant director of a Red Cross pilot program to mass-produce dried plasma, the model for the National Blood Donor Service, and introduced mobile collection units, later called bloodmobiles. At the armed forces' insistence the pilot excluded Black donors, and from January 1942 the Red Cross took their blood but kept it separate. Drew said there was no scientific evidence of any difference between the blood of different races. He had returned to Howard in April 1941; the National Library of Medicine finds no evidence that the policy was why he left.

On 1 April 1950, driving to a clinic in Tuskegee, Alabama, Drew fell asleep at the wheel near Burlington, North Carolina. At Alamance General Hospital three white physicians gave him transfusions, but he died of his injuries. The story that he was refused treatment has been repeatedly disproved.