Who is Dr. Charles Drew?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:01

This week we are shining a light on someone who is often overlooked. And yet his contributions to medical science revolutionized patient care not just in America, but around the world.

His life also highlights issues of race, resilience and the pursuit of excellence amidst major systemic barriers in America. For his time. So on this episode, I want to know, who is Dr. Charles Drew? Welcome to America, a history podcast.

I'm Liam Heffernan and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places and the events that make the USA a what it is today. To discuss this, I am joined by an attending vascular surgeon with the United States Veterans Administration based in Dublin, Ohio. At the moment.

He's the author also of four books, including Genius the Life and Legacy of Dr. Charles R. Drew, which we'll link to in the show notes. And I highly recommend you read it. It's a real pleasure to welcome to the podcast, Dr. Craig Miller.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:01:22

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:24

It's really, really good to have you on the podcast. And you know, I'm going to hold my hands up and admit I didn't know of Dr. Charles Drew until you reached out to me about your, your new book.

And having read your book, I'm actually quite embarrassed that I haven't heard of Dr. Drew beforehand. So, you know, I think this is going to be really fascinating and I'm really excited to sort of explore the life and legacy of this guy.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:01:50

Well, I agree with you that it is sort of an interesting phenomenon that someone should have flown under the radar and yet in some ways be so influential. And here in the US in practically every city, there's a Charles Drew building of some sort or some legacy to him.

And yet if you ask, certainly asked him, proverbial man on the street, they won't know anything about him. And even in his own line of work, which is my line of work, he's only vaguely known and his contributions only vaguely understood.

Hopefully we can change that.

Liam Heffernan: 00:02:25

Yeah, well, let's hope so. And I'm sure your book will go to great lengths in helping people learn about him as well. So let's kick off firstly at the beginning, naturally.

I wonder if you could tell me a bit about Charles's early life growing up in D.C. sure.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:02:41

nts. He was born in the early: 1900

He finished high school, but that was. Didn't quite finish high school.

But his mother had actually attended Howard University, which is quite an extraordinary accomplishment for an African American woman at that time. Although she had a degree in teaching, she remained a homemaker for the rest of her life and took care of her husband and their children.

al in the States in the early: 1900

There were immigrant families from many European countries and Native Americans in the old use of that termite, African Americans, some of whom were descended from slaves and some of whom were not. So it was a middle class neighborhood. Red brick buildings, wrought iron fences, parks, lighted streets.

In the biographical materials that you'll see about Drew over the years of fiction developed that he was. Had somehow come up from poverty and so forth. That was not the case. His family was. They were not wealthy, but they were also not poor.

Liam Heffernan: 00:04:15

I wonder how his upbringing, you know, might have shaped his ambition to pursue medicine and sort of the values that really allowed him to be as tenacious as he was to succeed at that.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:04:30

Yeah. So he was a member of the 19th Street Baptist Church, was a famous institution there in Washington for African Americans throughout his life.

We'll see the other places that he lived. But he was really a Washingtonian. His family inculcated the. The spirit of religiosity within him and those values. He. He was al.

Always close with his family as well. And they inculcated in him also a work ethic that was profound in all their children.

So I think that that is something that was part of that neighborhood in general.

Another thing that is interesting about the Foggy Bottom neighborhood is after he passed away, someone interviewed his brother, Joseph Drew, who's also very close with Charles, who everybody called Charlie, by the way, unless you were one of his residents or students later on or patients, certainly.

But he said that he and Charlie had the advantage in that neighborhood, that the schools that were segregated, the black schools, were superior to the white schools in Foggy Bottom. And then certainly when he went to high school, because he went to a very renowned high school, Paul Lawrence Dunbar in D.C. i mean, I guess we're.

Liam Heffernan: 00:05:44

Going to talk about this a lot, a lot later as well. But I guess for African Americans at that time, having a strong work ethic was essential because everything else was kind of against you. Right.

You had to have a strong work ethic.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:05:59

Yeah, I don't think there's any question about that. Drew and his cohort there had that great advantage of the school system being there.

I just, I want to mention something a little bit about that Dunbar High School, because in some ways it may have been the most outstanding academic high school in the United States at that time of any description. Most of the faculty were PhDs, you see, in their topics of interest. So his Latin teacher was a PhD in classic languages.

And, and it was a true classical education. He didn't learn Latin and Greek while he was there.

So it was an exceptional academic opportunity and he ultimately took great advantage of it, although he was also an exceptional athlete, and that was really the dominant thing of that period of his life.

Liam Heffernan: 00:06:45

Yeah, and actually, just to quickly, you know, you mentioned a bit about Foggy Bottom, but how did that area compare, you know, relative to the rest of the US Particularly in terms of its segregation and sort of the opportunities that were afforded to African Americans?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:07:02

I'm not a very good sociologic judge, but it seems to me that that was such an unusual, maybe even unique neighborhood. There were integrated neighborhoods throughout the US and working class areas, certainly.

But one gets the sense, and I don't have documentary evidence to back this up, but one gets the sense that there was a lot of conflict in there amongst the.

Between later immigrants from Europe and the African American, the newly freed African Americans, they're competing economically, they're competing for jobs that were not plentiful. And so that was certainly a bone of contention. That was the part of the thing that made Foggy Bottom, I think, so unique.

It wasn't a working class neighborhood, it was a middle class neighborhood. And there seems to have been pretty harmonious milieu there.

Although his brother did mention if you took the wrong turn, ended up on the wrong street, you might get a brick thrown at you. So always not kumbaya.

Liam Heffernan: 00:08:06

Yeah, you mentioned that he was, he was very academic and I guess sort of slightly fortunate in having a good school system where he lived. But you also mentioned he really loved athletics. I mean, was that his sort of first choice?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:08:18

I guess his athleticism really was the overriding thing. I don't think in high school. There isn't any evidence that he was particularly academic.

He passed his classes, but he was not at the top of his class. Nevertheless, he was a leader. He was very popular. He was a leader.

He was the head of the corps of cadets, for example, because we're talking now in World War I. But his athletic performance was exceptional in almost any sport. His first success actually was in swimming, of all things.

But his father was an outstanding swimmer and would take his children to swim in the Potomac River. So he became an excellent swimmer and then a competitive swimmer still while he was in what we would call grade school here.

When he got into high school at Dunbar, he really rose to the top in the American ball sports, basketball, football, baseball. He was a star in all of them. And that helped inform his later career.

And what, what transpired with his matriculation to college and really even in medical school.

Liam Heffernan: 00:09:24

Yeah.

Was it a more natural gateway into college for black Americans to pursue athletics and get a scholarship like Charles did at that time, as opposed to trying to stand out academically?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:09:38

I think, interestingly, it was not such an avenue to access higher education as it became later in the century. For example, Drew, there's a myth that he had an athletic scholarship to Amherst. That's not the case.

His scholarship mentions nothing about athletics or academics. It's just simply a letter offering him that.

Rosenwald scholarship in the: 1930

I don't, I'm not so naive as to think that his athletic performance and his potential athletic performance at the collegiate level didn't have something to do with their accepting him. But there were several other members of the class right before his who went from Dunbar to Amherst.

They also complete competed in athletics and were good athletes, but not to the extent that that Drew was, because he was a dominant force also in college.

So the, the short answer to that question is no, I don't, I don't think at that period of time that athletics was necessarily such an avenue to access of higher education as it later became in the 20th century and still is today.

Liam Heffernan: 00:10:59

I'm keen to understand, were there any sort of real formative moments in his early life that kind of shaped who he was as a person?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:11:09

I think one of the defining moments was the death of his sister. He had a sister called Elsie who was always sort of fragile.

She died at 13 from what appears to have been a combination of tuberculosis and the post war influenza. That was a defining moment for the family in general.

That his father was very close with all of his children, but had a particular closeness with his daughter. And the loss of Elsie was devastating. In fact, they moved probably as a result of that, to get to the healthier climb across the river in Arlington.

They moved out of Foggy Bottom Although we continued, everybody, they continued doing all their business in school over in Washington later on, in fact, in that same Rosenwald application, Drew indicated that it was the loss of his sister that got him interested in medicine as a career. I have my doubts about that, Liam. The reason is that it was two years later is when he graduated from high school.

And in his high school yearbook, as his potential profession, he put down engineering.

And at Amherst his first couple of years, you can see from the mathematics and science courses that he took that he was still interested in, that he took more advanced mathematics than he would need to for a medical career. I think that two things that have. I don't want to get ahead of us ourselves here, but two things happened in college that were more influential.

I'm not trying to cast dispersions on somebody who I have such high regard for, but neither of them would look as good on an application for a fellowship as talking about the death of a sister in your adolescence. So I think it certainly had an impact on him emotionally. I'm not sure how much of an impact it had on him. And for career choice.

Liam Heffernan: 00:12:51

Fair enough. I mean, let's talk about college then. You know, what do you think it was that caused that pivot into medicine arrived at Amherst?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:13:00

He sort of continued what he had, what had been his path at Dunbar, which was primarily athletics. His grades in the first couple of years at Amherst were below average.

He passed, but just passed on the other hand, on a basketball, sorry, football field and on the track and field pitches, he was outstanding. He then I think two things happened.

As I mentioned, one of them was that he suffered a pretty serious, potentially career ending injury to his ankle playing football.

And he was certainly exposed to the medical profession there in a way that he had not previously been X rays potential of surgery, going to New York City from Massachusetts for physician consultation. And I think that that had an impact on him by showing him something interesting he could potentially do with his life and help people along the way.

The other thing was that he had a teacher of biology, a fellow called Otto Glaser, who was a German immigrant and by all accounts was a very charismatic individual, energetic, powerful teacher. He seems to have really gravitate. Drew seems to have really gravitated to Glaser.

And it was essentially after that biology class that you see a dramatic uptick in his point average, including getting an A, which is the only one he ever got in Glaser's biology class.

So I think those two things, the football injury, exposure to the medical field, and then the presence of this charismatic teacher who demonstrated for him how interesting the life sciences were, that really touched him off. And he never looked back from Glaser's class onward. He was an exceptional student before Glaser's class average or below.

Liam Heffernan: 00:14:51

Do you think therein kind of lies something really important in that he's clearly an incredibly intelligent person when we later talk about everything that he accomplished. But as you mentioned, he never really excelled academically.

But before then, do you think that just that he never, I guess, realized how much interest he would have in medicine until he started being kind of exposed to it in, in, in college and maybe did that sort of unlock a sort of fire that he didn't have before, do you think?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:15:22

Precisely. That's exactly what happened. If you've got a passion in your life, you can't, you can't play to it unless you see it exposed to it. And if it.

You never heard of a, or never seen a violin, you're not going to be yet it's a Perlman, right? But somebody hands one to you, then you can, then you can take off. And I think that's what Glaser did.

He handed the violin to Charles Drew, and Drew then became a virtuoso.

Liam Heffernan: 00:15:51

That's, it's a good analogy.

And I think then, you know, let's, let's look briefly at the wider context here, because having the talent, having the interest and the intellectual potential to excel in medicine was one thing, but you know, college life at the time, particularly for a black American, that must have been incredibly challenging in, in, in, in a lot of other ways, right?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:16:16

Unquestionably, what, everything we're talking about right now could be applicable to someone right now. But what we're not talking about is the immense obstacles that he faced otherwise.

One of the advantages of being at Dunbar was maybe the, the most profound advantage, in addition to the exposure to the outstanding academicians there was that Dunbar had pipelines into some of the American universities, and one of the pipelines was to Amherst. There was a principal, the headmaster at Dunbar, who for many years had nurtured a relationship. He was a graduate of Amherst himself.

Amherst is notable for having had African American students all the way back into before our Civil War. So it was very liberal in that sense. So there was an avenue there, a hotline between Dunbar and.

So it was available to him and would not have been available if he had been born, say, in Mississippi, Florida, Georgia. Very lucky to have had that as an option, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation of course, yeah.

Liam Heffernan: 00:17:24

And I think it's just really important to just punctuate how much luck was such a factor in the success of non white Americans at that time. Right.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:17:35

ersities in the states in the: 1920

But 90% of them were in the 75 or so schools that we now call the historically black colleges and universities. So only about 10% of them were in non HBCU schools and essentially none in the South. The northern schools would accept a handful every year.

Of course, that's where the term token comes from. They would accept a handful every year. So outside of the HBCUs, there were essentially no academic options for them.

And it's the, the insurmountable barrier that ultimately Drew will run up against.

Liam Heffernan: 00:18:33

Yeah, and we're, we, we're going to address that a lot more when we talk about his, his career, because it certainly didn't end at college, as you say. So let's, let's move on, I guess, to his professional life. So he, he graduates college with a degree in medicine, is that right?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:18:51

No, he's got an undergraduate degree from, in general studies from Amherst. But by the time he's wearing the mortar board, he has determined that he wants to become a physician.

The problem is that his family, even though as I mentioned, they're not in poverty, they're also not well to do by any stretch. And they don't have the money to send him to medical school even if he can get in, which is a question in itself.

So what he did was a very practical thing.

He took a job at what's now Morgan State University in Baltimore as the athletic director and spends a year there achieving great success with his basketball and football teams as their head coach and the athletic director and saving money to go to go to medical school.

Liam Heffernan: 00:19:41

It's interesting because certainly nowadays, and maybe naively, we just assume that that career progression is really linear.

So you, you study medicine, you graduate, you do your years of, you know, interning and, you know, apprenticeships and, you know, resident work, whatever the correct terminology is, you can tell I'm not a doctor and then, you know, you move up and up and, you know, through the ranks. But it seemed like actually Charles took a very kind of non linear path, especially moving into kind of an athletics director role.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:20:15

Yeah, I think it was a very pragmatic choice on his part and a wise one, because it did a couple of things.

It helped him, certainly from the standpoint of cv, it's going to look good on there to have been, it'll say professor because he was assistant professor in addition to being the director of the entire athletic program. And as I say, I don't want to downplay the Morgan athletics were weak when he showed up there. By the time he left, they were a national powerhouse.

So that's not easy to do. So he brought a lot to that. And in addition, he filled up the coffers, at least for enough time to get into medical school.

Money was always a problem, always a problem. So I don't want to downplay that, but it was a pragmatic choice. He made it and it paid off.

Also, I think in going from being the coach to being the coach led to some personality changes that we could probably summarize as just maturation. He was a more mature man when he was done at Morgan and more prepared for what was coming.

Liam Heffernan: 00:21:17

You mentioned, though, even at school he was very likable and quite popular. But was he always a leader?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:21:24

Yes, he was always a leader. He was the eldest of the Drew children. He was a leader and example to all of them.

n father did pass away in the: 1930

But he was a leader in the family, was a leader at Dunbar, even at Amherst. He was a leader and was elected captain of the. The track team. I think that.

That he was just a natural leader even when he wasn't someone that you could look to for academic success. Even then he was a leader.

And it's probably worth touching on his time at McGill because he ended up drou did as a medical student in Montreal outside of the US which is an interesting story in itself and one I never really got to the bottom of. The family legend was that he was accepted into Harvard Medical School, but only for the following year.

And that would have entailed him staying at Morgan for one more year. And he didn't want to do that. I found no documentary evidence of that.

There's one letter from Harvard that exists in his papers that just shows that his application was too late and couldn't be considered. He certainly wouldn't have wanted to wait yet another year. How it was that he ended up at McGill is a little bit of a mystery.

The, the sort of conventional wisdom over the years has been that he wasn't able to get into an American medical school, but that the Canadian ones were more lenient when it came to accepting black Americans. But it doesn't take much ticking to recognize that that's actually not the case. The Canadian medical schools took almost no black Americans.

The very few that they did take were usually from the Caribbean islands that were in the Commonwealth. And even then the Commonwealth nations thought that they were underrepresented and even boycotted in the years before Drew got there.

So it remains kind of a mystery how it, how he ended up there. Nevertheless, when he did get to McGill, he was a genuine superstar.

Not only did in the Canadian roles, he was allowed to continue competing in athletics, he focused on track and field and became one of the truly great sports figures in Canadian collegiate history, setting all sorts of records that it took decades for anyone to surpass. And in the meantime ascended up to become the second ranked student at the time of graduation in his medical school class of more than 100.

So his achievements at McGill were really quite outstanding by any measure.

Liam Heffernan: 00:24:11

It's incredible, really, when it's like two different people. When you talk about his fairly mediocre, you know, academic grades in his early years compared to that.

And what do you think those key differences were that allowed him to excel so much at McGill?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:24:26

I think that the natural talent that he had that was sort of lurking beneath and we talked about the virtuosity that needs to have an avenue once it came to light, it was something that just could not be denied. And he applied the same sort of work ethic to his athletics and to his academics.

And once he did apply that same work ethic to both of them, he was just a natural superstar in addition to being a very charismatic individual. You know, somebody like that, it wouldn't be that hard for them to become egotistical and difficult to deal with. Not the case with Drew.

He was extremely popular at McGill, even though he was at the top of the class and a superstar athlete setting records. So he really is a hate to devolve into hagiography here. But while he was at McGill, it's difficult not to use the superlatives.

Liam Heffernan: 00:25:26

What I'm interested to know then is how he then went from clearly very, very successful medical student at McGill to finding his speciality where he then later made his name.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:25:40

Yeah, here's where he finally hits that insurmountable obstacle that we discussed a little bit earlier.

He very naturally being at the top of class at a medical school of significant renown would have expected that the next step would have been an easy application into one of the top American postgraduate medical scenarios. Very different than they are today, but nevertheless there's some similarities. You mentioned internship and residency.

Those sorts of things were just really starting to crystallize in American medicine the way we know them today. But they were available at universities primarily.

But then there were also some settings like the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, which was already renowned as this gigantic what we would now call multi specialty clinic of tremendous success in both clinical care and research. And he applied to McGill or from McGill to Mayo Clinic to be a surgery intern there and was rejected.

We don't have the rejection letter unfortunately, but the envelope exists. But it's clear that that's what transpired. And he had finally hit that insurmountable obstacle that no amount of hard work was going to defeat.

So he ended up as a result of that at Howard University, back in his hometown of Washington, which did have a medical school. There were two African American medical schools at that time in the States. There was Meharry in Nashville and there was Howard in Washington dc.

So he ended up having to return to Washington to Howard, which did not have a high reputation either as a distributor of clinical care or certainly it's training of surgeons to do his internship and residency. There was really no choice for him. And I'm not answering to your question yet, but let me transition to that because we will.

So when he arrives there, they know what they've got. Some of the leaders at the medical school at Howard were very forward thinking individuals.

Mordecai Johnson was the president of the school and he was president for decades there. And a powerful individual. He knew what he wanted to do with Howard and he brought it up into the first line of American universities.

And so too was the dean of the medical school as a fellow called Numa Adams and his full name is a mouthful, it's Pompilius Garfield Adams. Adams was a graduate of Howard, a successful physician in Chicago, when alma mater came knocking and he returned and did the same thing.

Adams had a plan that turned out to be very successful and his plan was the following.

He was going to bring in, this is with the help of the Rockefeller foundation who provided the funds for this bring in noted white clinician professors from white medical schools to lead the divisions, surgery, internal medicine and so forth. And they were going to identify African Americans within their departments who they were going to train to then take over the reins.

Adams, I'm sure would have been perfectly fine with bringing in his own African Americans. But he had to play ball with the Rockefeller Foundation. And that was his compromise and it was a very effective one.

He brought in a fellow called Hal from Columbia University to run the Department of Surgery for a proscribed period of time, five year prescribed period of time, of five years, I believe is what it was. At the same time, Adams recruited Drew out of who didn't have many choices out of McGill.

And it didn't take long for them to realize, well, Drew is the guy who needs to take over when Howe's time here is finished.

So this has an impact on Drew's career because he spends a couple of years doing clinical work as a, as a trainee a resident at Howard and then at the recommendations of how who remember had come from Columbia up in New York.

Drew now takes a Rockefeller Fellowship to train at Columbia at the Presbyterian Hospital, University Hospital in New York City at one of the top places in the world, right on a par certainly with Mayo. So he ends up through the back door in a sense at a place where he can get the clinical training that he could, he was denied. Through the front door.

That's where he starts working on the blood is at Columbia.

Liam Heffernan: 00:30:19

What was the sort of bit of research or work that really kind of put him on the map, as it were?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:30:24

Sure. When he gets there, the initial thought is there's going to be difficulty. There hasn't been a black surgery resident before at Columbia.

Is he going to be accepted? That hospital then in particular had an upper crust clientele, if you will, and there's some concern. And his mentors there.

His chief mentor is Alan Whipple, who's a man of great renown in the surgical community, devised an operation that's still being done today. And Whipple recorded that Drew actually offered himself. He said, why don't you just let me work in the lab?

I won't go to the wards, won't upset anybody. And Whipple said that's what you want to do. We can do it that way. So he does and he goes under the aegis of a.

A fellow called John Scudder, who's doing research at that time in shock. And this is where the blood bank comes in. In order to really understand it, we've got to talk about what shock means because it's. It's a loaded term.

It's a loaded term outside of the medical field and has a host of different meanings. It's difficult to understand even within the medical field. But I'll try and summarize it.

Shock is the Imbalance between oxygen delivery and oxygen needs of an organism. And it can be caused by a number of different things. It can be caused.

You can have cardiogenic shock where the heart isn't pumping enough for the blood, which carries the oxygen to the tissues to get there effectively. You can go into shock as a result of that, because oxygen isn't being delivered to tissues.

You can go into shock from neurogenic causes, from strokes, or from spinal injuries where the blood vessels, as a result of the loss of neural tone, will dilate up too much. Again, the blood delivery, and thus the oxygen delivery, is diminished. You may go into shock as a result of that.

The easiest conceptually to understand is what we call hypovolemic shock, which is loss of blood from an injury. You lose it on the battlefield, potentially you lose it postpartum, whatever the source is.

If you lose too much blood too quickly, you can go in shock. It's a little more complicated than just not having enough blood. But for our purposes, that's a worthwhile way of thinking of it.

So how do you replace the blood? For years, obviously, the concept of transfusion has been around. This guy doesn't have enough blood. This guy's got plenty.

at dates back at least to the: 1600

The technical problems of doing that were the first things to be surrounded because they didn't realize there were physiologic problems, too. But once the technical problems have been solved, here's how you get the blood flowing.

You draw it out, move over and put it in typodermic needles and so forth. That's oversimplifying for purposes of time.

But once the technical method of transfusion of blood had been solved, the next problem that they recognized was there were blood groups which hadn't been thought about before. If I give you my blood and we're not the same type, okay, you got more blood now, you should be fine. No, instead, you died. What happened?

Well, blood groups may be an A, you may be a B. They don't. The two don't play well together. That needed to be solved. Once that's solved. Now we get the question of how do I.

Let's say that you show up at my doorstep at the hospital and you've lost a liter of blood. How do I get you? I can type it from potential donors here in the hospital.

How do I get it to you fast enough that you don't die before we get the blood? Then came the concept of blood storage.

Now We've got to have blood on hand so that we can give it to people instead of having to do a transfusion on site between one person to another. And that's where we are. When Drew goes into John Scudder's lab to study shock at Columbia, there's already work being done across the world.

Russia had done some work in Chicago. They had done some work. Work being done in the UK on this concept of banking blood. But there were all sorts of obstacles.

And what Drew did just sort of in a nutshell, was look at them all and systematically knock them all out. When he started, there were a half dozen or so major problems with doing blood banking. How long can we keep blood?

What happens to it if you apply this to it? What happens to it at this temperature?

He systematically, at first, with the guidance of Scudder and then on his own, completely knocks them all out, so that when he's done a year and a half later, basically all the problems, the practical problems of blood banking are now solved. That's why he's called the father of blood banking. And more. More to come, other things.

Liam Heffernan: 00:34:49

Yeah, I mean, that in itself is. Is incredible. And I wonder if you could just.

If it's possible in sort of layman's terms, to just explain what the kind of the real world impact of those changes were.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:35:03

Sure.

Well, the next thing of importance was that as they started to put together the blood bank, their Columbia Presbyterian Blood bank, they started to recognize that they were some other issues that were involved. And after they solved them, almost simultaneously, the war breaks out.

And so you can see this serendipity of the problems of blood banking solved right at the time where it's of the most profound and dire need. So one of the things that happens is Drew is finished at Columbia.

He's got his Doctor of Science degree, which is sort of unique to them, sort of like a PhD. It's not that he got a medical degree from McGill, but they bring him back because he's the one who knows the very most about all of these issues.

And right at that time, this concept comes out from something called the Blood Transfusion Betterment association, which is a bunch of leaders in New York medicine, corporate people, and also physicians who are trying to do just what that says, blood transfusion betterment, and the American Red Cross. And there's a very noble effort to provide transfusion materials to the British, who at that time are under the knife, so to speak, of the Blitz.

And they feel that Drew is probably the right person to lead this effort. So he does, and he starts to solve the practical problems of doing blood donorship on a gigantic level.

ork City and in the summer of: 1940

Liam Heffernan: 00:36:50

I mean, this is all just absolutely, you know, extraordinary stuff. And it's quite baffling to me that he's not a household name for the fact that he.

It seems like he's completely revolutionized the way that blood is stored and transferred from one person to another. I mean, the lives he must have saved from his work.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:37:11

Countless. I mean, this is something. This would be a good. Actually, it'd be a good book.

d on the battlefield in, say,: 1943

ou can't store whole blood in: 1940

It will deteriorate by then or get infected with bacteria and then become a vector of death. Instead, they determined that blood plasma, which is a supernatant, let the.

Let the cells of the blood drop to the bottom with gravity or centrifuge, take the fluid on the top of it and transfuse that. That'll actually work almost as well as whole blood. And that will last for weeks. That's what they sent over there.

ou're wounded on the field in: 1943

You can take the plasma as a powder, put some water in it, hang up the iv, you've got a casualty who survives, maybe to fight another day. If you're on the German side in Europe or on Japanese side in the Pacific, that's not an option. You may be dead on the field.

It's an interesting juxtaposition. Wouldn't have happened without Charles Drew.

Liam Heffernan: 00:38:43

And we can hypothesize about what is the impact of the work that he's done, but actually it's quite plausible to imagine a scenario where if he hadn't done his. His work at the time that he did it, that World War II could have.

Could have swung in a slightly different direction, because, you know, these are the sort of. These are the unsung heroes of events like this, whose work actually contributes to ultimately the sort of the outcome that we.

That we all know about. Right?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:39:11

Sure. I mean, how many straws does it take to finally break the camel's back? Who knows? But he was certainly contributing to it in a gigantic way.

And more even so than we. We talked about the technology that he applied to it. But his.

His performance in the Blood for Britain program was so outstanding, he returned to Howard and he started his career there. And he was drawn back by the Red Cross, who said, we need you now to do an American blood drive.

Everybody could see, sooner or later we're going to be in this fight ourselves. We need somebody who can organize it nationwide. And they brought him in to do that.

And that's really what led to the battlefield things that we talked about.

Liam Heffernan: 00:39:55

And yet, you know, with. With all of that in mind, he's still working in an America that is segregated, that is. Is. Is. Is immensely racially discriminate.

I mean, it makes his achievements even more spectacular, really, because he had so many extra barriers to. To break through, didn't he?

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:40:16

Almost inconceivable that happened. I think a lot of it has to do with his own. Just his personal magnetism and his undeniable ability. His. His talent was so extraordinary.

It was shortly after he. Now he. He eventually said, look, I've done what I can do. I think some of it had to do with some problems that were happening at home.

We haven't even talked about the fact that he got married during this period. He met his wife, had their first child. He's trying to maintain households in Washington and New York while this is happening.

And they don't have the money for that. They barely have enough for one household. They're working on two here.

His academic career is on postponement, and on top of all of that, he's also studying for the American Board of Surgery examination, which, as I can tell you, is a very challenging test indeed. And he passes it, by the way, in the midst of all of this, with outstanding scores.

So outstanding, in fact, that he's immediately made an examiner of the American Board of Surgery, which is almost unheard of and for a black surgeon at the time, is completely unheard of. Yes. Shortly, though, after he leaves the Red Cross blood drive effort. He is out of it now.

And this is an important point because it's sometimes mentioned in biographical material that he was still part of it and resigned in protest. It's after he left that the Red Cross starts to segregate the blood as they collect it. They were not doing that before he left.

It probably was not related to his leaving. It was probably related to the involvement in the military who remained segregated at this period of time.

They weren't desegregated until after World War II. And that was probably. You'll sometimes see. Well, he resigned in protest.

Liam Heffernan: 00:42:00

That's not the case.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:42:00

He was back at Howard when they created that policy, execrable as it was. And it was. It was protested against very vehemently by the African American community at the time.

Naturally became one of the spokespeople for him, a reluctant spokesman, because he was. He generally tried to avoid conflict, I think.

But later on in the war, he became more vocal and became a powerful advocate for rescinding that hateful policy.

Liam Heffernan: 00:42:30

Yeah. Which is incredible. You know, using his. His position as a.

As a black man in a position of influence, which was quite uncommon at the time, and using it for the greater good is quite amazing. But there's something that I do have to ask about. You know, on the subject of the segregation of blood.

There is a quite tragic myth that Drew died because he was denied a blood transfusion at a white hospital. That seems almost too cruelly ironic to be true.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:43:01

Yeah. The source of that. That is a myth. The source of it remains a mystery.

If someone wanted to do a PhD thesis on the difference between the axis and allied responses to injury, they could also do one on the historiography of where that myth arose from. It appears to have been current certainly by the mid-50s.

And then in the: 1960

And they tell that story within it. It's fictional that Drew was denied a transfusion.

What happened was he, along with three other physicians, were driving from Washington, D.C. to Tuskegee, Alabama, to do a free clinic down there, sort of thing that you might expect Drew to do. And shortly after, they crossed the North Carolina line from Virginia. It's the middle of the. It's the middle of the morning.

By this point, they've all been up. It was a Saturday morning. They had been working all Friday, and Drew basically fell asleep with the wheels. What happened?

He was sort of known to do that. His family knew that he would sometimes doze at the wheel, and this time it cost him everything. The car crashed. The other three. Two suffered.

One suffered a broken arm. The other one was slightly injured. One was perfectly fine. And Drew had fatal injuries. Open head wound. I mean, his cranium was visible.

It was not survivable. He was taken to a local hospital, Alamance County Hospital there, which was not a trauma center by any stretch of the imagination.

But it didn't really matter because there wasn't anything contained be done. They didn't have transfusion technology there, so they couldn't have done that anyway. They did volume expansion with plasma, but not blood. So that.

That. That was not. Not an issue, sadly.

Liam Heffernan: 00:44:55

I mean, I felt like there's so much more that we need to talk about here, but in. In the interest of time, I just wonder if you could sort of summarize for.

For me and the listeners, you know, why should we know, remember and celebrate the name of. Of Dr. Charles Drew contribution.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:45:12

And we barely even touched on his contribution to African American medicine itself, in the sense that his overriding drive in his life, in addition to being an excellent clinical surgeon, was to teach and train the next generation of surgeons and to create a tradition at Howard University and throughout the country of training of excellent black physicians to serve both their own community primarily, but. But also the world at large. That in and of itself would be enough, and it is enough.

If you look the Society of Black Academic Surgeons, for example, their logo is his face. And that's entirely. That's perfect. There's a Charles Drew University of Health Sciences in Los Angeles. That's perfectly appropriate, too.

Contribution that we talked about with blood banking affects the entire world because that technology now is everywhere. What Drew did was, from a scientific perspective, was a practical matter. It would have been solved by someone at some point.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate the fact that it was solved by this man at this point where it was such a pivotal moment in history that, as you mentioned, the entire history of the world may have been a different story if he hadn't been where he was at that time doing that work. For all of these reasons, his memory should be preserved and celebrated. I think.

Liam Heffernan: 00:46:33

Yeah. And I think we have only really, as you say, sort of scratched the surface of everything that he did and contributed to the world of medicine.

But it's been a really fascinating insight into someone that I don't think is celebrated enough outside of those kind of medical circles. And it's been really interesting talking to you Craig, and to anyone listening as well.

If you are interested in finding out more, we'll leave some links in the show notes so that you can explore more and read more about Dr. Drew and Craig. Do remind everyone where they can get the book and how they can connect with you.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:47:11

My website is drcraganmiller.com very easy to get to. It's just my middle initial is A and that's the thing people forget, you know.

So it's drcraganmiller.com it has my books and everything and links to where you can get them. But you can get on Amazon or any of the other usual online outlets to find Genius Unbroken the Life and legacy of Dr. Charles R. Drew.

Liam Heffernan: 00:47:35

Yeah, great. And it really is such a great read and I'll link to it in the show notes as well for anyone that wants to go and buy it.

And if you are enjoying the podcast, please do remember to leave us a rating and a review wherever you're listening to this. And if you follow the show, all future episodes will just appear in your feed. And additionally you can know if you really love what we do.

There are some links in the show notes to support us from as little as $1, which everyone involved will greatly appreciate. Thanks again to Dr. Craig Miller for joining me. Thank you all so much for listening to the podcast and goodbye.

Dr. Craig Miller: 00:48:18

SA.