Charles Drew & Blood Banks

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. In our recent episode on the Coconut Grove fire, we mentioned that blood banking was really a brand new innovation when the fire happened, and that you could expect an episode on that which was at that moment in the works. That's what we are talking about today, and we're going to focus on one particular person who was a big part of the development of blood banks. That was Dr Charles Drew. His friend and colleague William Montague Cobb, who we covered on the podcast in February, described Dr Drew as quote one of the most constructively active figures in the medical profession. Charles Richard Drew was born in Washington, d c. On June third, nine four. He was the oldest child of Richard and Nora Burrow Drew. Richard Drew was a carpet layer, and he was the only black member of the otherwise whites only Carpet, Linoleum and Soft Tile Layers Union, also serving as the financial secretary of the union's DC local. Nora had a teaching degree from Howard University, and she did some volunteer work, but was primarily a full time wife and mother. Charles went by Charlie and his younger siblings were Joseph, Elsie, Nora, and Eva. The Drews were really close knit, middle class family. They were members of nineteen Street Baptist Church and the children attended Washington, d c. Segregated schools for black children. They also had access to a segregated swimming pool where Charlie learned to swim and quickly proved that he was a talented athlete. He earned his first swimming medal at the age of eight. Charlie was also described as clever, hardworking, and reliable. He started selling newspapers to earn extra money at the age of twelve, and he quickly developed this into a whole enterprise in which he managed six other newspaper boys, like William Montague Cob Charlie attended Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School. Dunbar was the first public high school for black students in the US, and it had become one of the best college preparatory schools in the country. But Charlie's best performance at Dunbar was As an athlete. He lettered in four sports, and in his junior and senior years he was awarded the James E. Walker Memorial Medal for all around athletic performance. Charlie also served as captain of the high school Cadet Corps, and he was very well liked among his peers. In the yearbook, they named him best Athlete, most popular student, and student who has done the most for the school. After graduating from Dunbar, both Charles Drew and William Montague Cob went to Amherst College in Massachusetts. Many Dunbar graduates went on to college there, and most of Amherst Black students had graduated from Dunbar. When Drew and Cobb were there, the college had about six hundred students, and thirteen of them were black. Drew hoped to become an engineer, even though at this point there were almost no black engineers in the United States. Drew continued to truly excel as an athlete while at Amherst, but he and his black teammates also faced discrimination, both at Amherst and while on the road for games. This included everything from being denied seating at restaurants to being targeted and harassed by players on opposing teams, and based on his athletic performance, Drew should have been named captain of both the football and track teams his senior year, but a white player was elected captain of the football team instead. The same thing had happened on both the cross country and track teams when Drew was a junior, so this definitely looked like a pattern of racism. Drew seems to have tried to avoid controversy, supporting the elected captain and later being unanimously elected captain of the track team. He earned multiple medals and awards for his athletic performance during his time at Amherst, including the Howard Hill Mossman Trophy, which went to the student who had brought the greatest honor to athletics during their time at the college. Drew also had some experiences while at Amherst that shifted his focus from engineering some medicine. He had never been a particularly exceptional student. William Montague Cobb described him as never earning a grade above a sea, but biology professor Otto Glazer got him interested in science. Drew also had a sports injury that required surgery and that led him to start thinking about medicine and surgery as a field, and in May of nineteen twenty, his sister, Elsie died. In a med school application, he wrote, quote, my first real urgent desire to study medicine came when my sister died with an attack of influenza. In the great epidemic here in nineteen twenty. No one seemed to be able to stop it, and people died by the hundreds every week. I have studied the sciences diligently since that time, so this would have been at the very very end of the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic, and it really illustrates how even though we usually talk about that pandemic in terms of nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen, there were still significant outbreaks happening into nineteen twenty, and the people living through it felt like this was all part of one pandemic. It was all part of the same thing. I can't imagine what that's like. Charles True graduated from Amherst College in nineteen twenty six, but he didn't have money for medical school. He got a job at Morgan College in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was athletic director and instructor of biology and chemistry. Much as he had excelled as an athlete, he excelled as a coach, and he was credited with really turning around some of the school's teams, especially in football and basketball. Yeah, this is all he He applied all of this to his later work in medicines, the things he had learned as an athlete and as a coach. After saving money for two years, Drew thought he was financially ready for medical school, but actually finding a medical school to go to was a challenge. Most medical schools at this point did not accept black students at all, or if they did, they only accepted a very limited number. This was also in the post Flexner Report era. We did an episode about the flex Inner Report on the show in July of This was a report on the state of medical education in the United States, and its author, Abraham Flexner, described most of the medical schools for black students as subpar. In the wake of this report, every black medical school that Flexner had described as lacking closed, So when Drew started applying to medical school in there were only two schools for black students left. They were a Harry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, and Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, d C. Drew applied at Howard and at Harvard Medical School, which, unlike most of the rest of Harvard, is in Boston rather than Cambridge. Harvard had admitted its first black students in eighteen fifty, but its medical students were still overwhelmingly white. He was accepted at Harvard, although he had submitted his application late and was asked to defer his enrollment by a year because the incoming class was already full, But his application at Howard was denied on the grounds that he did have enough credits in English. Howard instead offered him a faculty position as a coach, which Drew found incredibly frustrating. It seemed bizarre that the school thought his English education was good enough to teach, but not to be a student. I admit that does seem very strange. Drew didn't want to wait another year to start medical school, so rather than going to Harvard, he made one more application. That was to McGill University College of Medicine in Montreal, Canada, which was racially integrated and had a reputation for being at least somewhat more welcoming to black students. We will get to his time in Montreal and what happened after that after we take a quick sponsor break. At McGill University College of Medicine, Charles Drew made a name for himself as both a students and an athlete. He became captain of the track team and was the champion in hurdles, the high jump, and the broad jump. He was also inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society, and he took first prize at an annual competition in neuro anatomy. In his final year, he was awarded the Williams Prize, which was based on a competitive exam. At the same time, these were difficult years, especially financially. The university was in an expensive area, so his housing and dated a living expenses were well beyond what he was used to. The Great Depression started about a year after he enrolled, which made things harder. He almost ran out of money with only a year left to go, but then he was awarded a one thousand dollar Rosenwald Fellowship. Without that he probably would have had to drop out. Drew graduated second in his class in nine three with a Doctor of Medicine, and Master of Surgery degree. From there, he spent two years at Montreal General Hospital, first as an intern and then as a resident and internal medicine. While he was there, he worked with a bacteriology professor John Beatty on the human body's fluid balance and ways to use fluids to treat shock. During Drew's residency, several patients were badly burned during a fire at the hospital. Drew was one of the doctors on duty, and during the crisis he used transfusions to treat multiple patients for shock. This may have been an inspiration for his later work on blood banking. Not much was known about how to safely store blood for later use, and many transfusions involved a human donor in the room with the patient connected arm to arm. It was clear that medical facilities needed better ways to store things like blood and plasma. You know, we'll be talking a bit more about the state of transfusion history and just a little bit. In December of nineteen thirty four, as he was finishing his residency in Montreal, Drew started trying to find a surgical residency in the United States, specifically at the Mayo Clinic, but his application was denied At this point, most black doctors did their residencies at one of six black hospitals, but there were almost no residency opportunities for black doctors and specialties like surgery. Like most of the people who are doing residencies are doing internal medicine, general medicine, family practice type of work. Even if a predominantly white medical school did accept black students, the affiliated teaching hospitals often did not allow black people in roles that involved patient care. They were basically prioritizing the feelings of racist doctors and patients who might not want to work with a black person. In the face of all of this, Drew wrote a letter to William Montayucab, who was working at Howard, asking what the setup was like at the university. In spite of Howard having previously rejected his med school application, Drew thought there might be some way to continue his training there. Just after this, Drew also needed to return to Washington, d C. For personal reasons. His father died in January of nineteen thirty five, and his family needed his help. Beyond needing to be back in Washington, d C. It turned out that this was the right time for Drew to take another look at Howard. Howard University was established in eighteen sixty seven, and it's College of Medicine had its first classes a year later. Although Howard is a historically black university, its founder, Oliver Otis Howard, was white, and for decades after it was established, the faculty and the administration were also overwhelmingly white. That started to change in the nineteen twenties. Mordechai Johnson became Howard's first black president, and the university started actively trying to recruit black professors and to generally improve the quality of all of its departments and schools. When it came to the School of Medicine, this was tricky. Howard had been training black doctors for decades, but almost none of them had any opportunity for specialized training or advanced postgraduate education in medicine. That meant that graduates from the medical school were qualified to practice medicine, but not necessarily to teach, especially to teach any kind of medical specialty. Changing that pattern meant recruiting black doctors and helping them continue their education, with the goal that they would then become part of the faculty at Howard. This also came up in our episode on William Montague Cobb, who went on to advance study in anatomy and physical anthropology. As part of this same effort, Drew wrote a letter to one of his old coaches at Dunbar High about this and about the opportunity he was now seeing. Quote seventy years there has been a Howard med School, but there is still no tradition. No able surgeon has ever been trained there, No school of thought has been born there. Few of their stars have ever hit the headlines in American surgery. There are no Negro representatives in so far as the men who count now. All Negro doctors are just country practitioners, capable of sitting with the poor and the sick of their race, but not given to too much intellectual activity, and not particularly interested in advancing medicine. This attitude I should like to change. It should be great sport. Drew took a position at Howard University College of Medicine and became chief resident at Freedman's Hospital. In that same year, Edward Lee Howse was hired as chief of Surgery. House was white, but his hiring was part of a five year plan in which he would run the surgical program while a black surgeon was trained as his successor. Funding for this came from a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Soon Charles Drew was pursuing a doctorate of medical science at Columbia University and a fellowship at Presbyterian Hospital. Drew was Columbia's first black resident, and Presbyterian Hospital had been established to serve quote the poor of New York without regard to race, creed, or color. But even so, everybody at the university and the hospital seemed to assume that Drew was going to be working in a lab, not with patients. This included surgical department head Alan O. Whipple, whose name you might recognize if you've ever had particular surgeries or watched medical TV shows. So at first, Drew worked mainly with Assistant Professor of Clinical Surgery, John Scudder, whose team was working on research related to the body's fluid, balanced blood chemistry and blood transfusions. So this did build on some of Drew's earlier work with John Beaty at McGill, and it included trying to develop blood tests to detect signs of shock. Scudder was immediately impressed by Drew, and as Drew gained his support. He eventually got Whipple to let him move into patient care as well. A lot of the credit for this goes to Drew's knowledge, skill, dedication, and personality. He had always been extremely well liked anywhere he had studied and worked. Colleagues described him as lighting up everyone around him when he arrived on the ward, even if that was at two a m. But there's also some speculation that his approval to do patient care was also tied to his appearance. Drew and his family all had very light skin, so patients might think he was white. Drew apparently mentioned his race when introducing himself to people because it was important to him that they knew that he was black. I'm really curious about exactly what that introduction sounded like like that that aspect of it wasn't mentioned in the in the biography that made that note, but I wonder. A big part of Drew's work continued to be related to blood and plasma transfusions. So we've talked a little bit about the history of blood transfusions on the show before, including in a two parter on Jean Baptiste Deny that came out in January of one Denise work took place in the seventeenth century, and it involved transfusions from animals to humans. The first human to human blood transfusions took place about a hundred and fifty years later. American physician Philip seeing Physics reportedly performed one in seventeen, but didn't publish on his work. James Blundell successfully performed a human to human transfusion on a patient who was experiencing postpartum bleeding, and that one was documented in eighteen eighteen. These first transfusions saved the lives of some patients, but others experienced severe reactions, and it first actors didn't know the cause. In the early twentieth century, Carl Landsteiner made a series of discoveries that came to be known as the A BO blood types, which come from antigens in a person's red blood cells. Making sure that both the donor and the recipient had the same blood type prevented most of these reactions, although aspects of this were yet to be discovered. Land Steiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this. In n blood coagulates very quickly after being removed from the body, so the first blood transfusions went directly from one person's body into another's, either by drawing the donor's blood into a surrender and injecting it into the recipient right away, or by connecting each of them to an apparatus that carried the blood through tubes from the donor to the recipient. So instead of blood banks, at first, hospitals maintained lists of people who were willing to be contacted on short notice to come in and donate blood when it was needed. My grandfather was one of these people because he had OH negative blood. In nineteen fourteen, researchers discovered that sodium citrate could be used as an anticoagulant, but most transfusions continued to be direct transfusions, with the donor and recipient being in the room together, because even if the blood wasn't coagulating, it still broke down very quickly. But during World War One, multiple doctors worked out ways to keep blood cold, allowing them to store it for a short time before administering it to a recipient. One was Oswald Hope Robertson of the U. S. Army Medical Corps, who established so called blood depots where donated blood was kept on ice. Also during World War One, Gordon Are Awards started researching the use of plasma rather than whole blood. Plasma is the liquid part of the blood which contains water, proteins, mineral salts, and other substances, but not the red bood cells, white blood cells, or platelets. Plasma had a much longer shelf life than whole blood, and it was less likely to transmit some blood borne diseases since it didn't contain those red blood cells. It could also be used regardless of a person's blood type. It couldn't be used for every single application that whole blood could, but in a lot of cases it worked really well. By the nineteen thirties, multiple physicians and research institutes were working on ways to use, preserve, and store whole blood and plasma, as well as ways to fraction out different plasma components to use for different purposes, and researchers in the Soviet Union we're also making discoveries about how to preserve, store, and use blood based on work that they were doing with cadaver blood. Bringing all of this knowledge together, Bernard Fantas, director of Cook County Hospital in Chicago, as credited with opening the first blood bank on March fifteenth, nineteen thirties. Even He's also credited with coining the word blood bank, which he hoped would make lay people comfortable with the idea of donating blood and receiving donated blood. He was able to keep donated blood usable for about ten days. Soon, other blood banks followed to return to Charles Drew. In August of nineteen thirty nine, he and John Scudder set up an experimental blood bank at Presbyterian Hospital. Work at the blood bank formed the basis of Drew's dissertation Banked Blood, A Study and Blood Preservation. In This dissertation was more than three hundred fifty pages long, summarizing the history that had led up to the development of blood banks, along with what was known about cadaver blood, placental blood, changes to blood caused by preservation, different methods of preservation and their pros and cons and the research that he and Scudder had conducted at the experimental blood bank at Presbyterian Hospital. Scudder called it quote one of the most distinguished essays ever written, both in form and content. We'll talk about how Charles Drew's career unfolded after finishing this work. After we take a quick sponsor break. In April of ninety nine, while Charles Drew was in his last year at Columbia University, he went to the annual meeting of the John A. Andrew Clinical Society at Tuskegee University in Alabama. This was both a free clinic and a teaching and learning opportunity. On the way there, he stopped in Atlanta, where he saw many Lenore Robins known as Lenore at the dining hall at Spellman College, where she was a professor of home economics. Charles was interested in her and some of their friends through a party and invited her to it. He fell in love immediately, and he stopped in Atlanta again on the way home from the conference to propose to her. He described this as the only rash, unplanned, unpremeditated thing he had done in years. Charles and Lenore got married a few months later on September. Not long after, in n Charles Drew became the first black person to earn a medical doctorate from Columbia University. Later that year, Charles and Lenore had their first child, a daughter named BB like b B for blood bank. They would go on to have three more children, Charlene Raya and Charles Jr. After finishing at Columbia, Drew went back to Howard as planned, he became an assistant professor of surgery and a surgeon at Freedman's Hospital. He expected to spend the rest of his career training Black surgeons. That is really what he considered to be his life's work. But then World War two intervened and Drew was asked to going the Blood for Britain project. This was an effort to collect and package massive amounts of blood plasma in the United States and send it overseas to the UK, where it was desperately needed during the Blitz. Other researchers involved included John Scudder and E. H. L. Corwin. Drawing from what they learned at the experimental blood Bank at Presbyterian Hospital, drew thesis, and other research, they put together a plan to recruit blood donors, separate out the plasma under sterile conditions, add an anti microbial agent, test it, and package it in glass bottles diluted with sterile saleine. Uh as somebody who donates blood. The fact that they were using glass bottles just threw me for a second, and then I was like of course, they they didn't have the kind of plastic that we used today at that point. At first, Drew worked on this project while still keeping up his duties at Howard, but in September he was us to join the Blood for Britain project full time as its medical director, so he took a leave of absence between then. In January of nineteen forty one, the Blood for Britain Project collected fourteen thousand, five hundred fifty six blood donations and shipped more than five thousand liters of plasma to Britain. This was a massive undertaking. It was on a scale far beyond any of the blood banking efforts that existed before this point. After the Blood for Britain Project ended, Drew was asked to help establish a national blood bank program through the American Red Cross, with technical aspects managed by the National Research Council. While the Blood for Britain program had used liquid plasma, the Red Cross program focused primarily on dried plasma. Drew was medical director of a pilot program that could become a template for large scale efforts to collect and stockpile blood and blood plasma for both civilian and military use. Drew again worked to develop a standardized procedure that can be put into place at donation centers all across the country and ensure that donated blood was safe and stable. As part of this, he helped develop mobile refrigerated blood donation centers, also known as blood mobiles. Using systems and protocols that Drew developed, the Red Cross collected thirteen million bottles of blood between nineteen forty one and nineteen forty five. People started calling Drew the father of the Blood Bank, although he insisted that he should not get the soul credit for any of this. He was really competitive throughout his life, but he also carried his experience as an athlete who was a part of a team into his work in medicine. He knew that he did not do any of this by himself, and that he was building on the work of many other people. Drew was expected to stay on as medical director at the Red Cross until the end of April nineteen forty one, which was when is leave at Howard was going to end, but for unclear reasons, he resigned on April one. Letters that he sent to family and friends around this time suggests that he was finding the work stressful and difficult was maybe having some conflicts with some of the people he was working with. He also had a wife and a new baby at home, being separated from them was hard for everyone involved. On top of all of this, I mean, he was doing an incredibly important, demanding wartime job, separated from his family, and also trying to study for his American Board of Surgery exams. Not a full plate at all. It's a lot a lot of accounts of Drew's life give another reason, which was the Red Cross's decision not to accept blood from black donors. The Red Cross really did do this, but timing doesn't line up with Drew's departure. This was tied to a War Department policy which read quote, for reasons which are not biologically convincing, but which are commonly recognized as psychologically important. In America, it is not deemed advisable to collect and mix Caucasian and Negro blood indiscriminately for later administration two members of the military forces. The Red Cross announced that it would exclude black donors to align with the War departments policy in November of nineteen forty one, so that was months after Drew left. Drew did, however, speak out against this policy once it was in place, as did many other physicians and civil rights organizations, including the n double a CP. On January twenty one, nineteen forty two, the Red Cross announced a change in policy, quote, the American Red Cross, in agreement with the Army and Navy, is prepared hereafter to accept blood donations from colored as well as white persons, and deference to the wishes of those for whom the plasma is being provided, the blood will be processed separately, so that those receiving transfusions may be given plasma from blood of their own race. I have so many feelings this, of course, was still discriminatory, and the idea that blood donations needed to be separated by race was scientifically unfounded. Drew said of this quote, I feel that the ruling of the United States Army and Navy regarding the refusal of colored blood donors is an indefensible one from any point of view. There is no scientific basis for the separation of the blood of different races, except on the basis of the individual blood types or groups. He also gave interviews on the subject and wrote letters to officials condemning the policy of segregating blood donation by race. Yeah, he clearly was justifiably outraged by this policy, It does not appear to have been the reason that it he left the Red Cross, though the timeline just does not intersect in that way. To return to Drew his career, though he did pass his board exam ms in April of nineteen forty one. By October, he had become the head of the Department of Surgery at Howard and chief surgeon at Freedman's Hospital, as well as becoming an examiner for the American Board of Surgery. While training black doctors and surgeons, he also advocated for their medical careers and their inclusion in major medical societies, many of which either excluded black members entirely or left the membership requirements up to local chapters, with many of those chapters excluding black people. Often this made black doctors ineligible for jobs that required membership in an organization like the a m A. Drew repeatedly advocated for the inclusion of black members and the American Medical Association and the American College of Surgeons. Drew continued to advance in his own career as well. In nineteen forty four, he became chair of the Surgical Section of the National Medical Association, a national organization for black doctors. He became chief of staff at Freedman's Hospital, and he was also awarded then double a CP Spring arm Metal for achievement in recognition of his work in blood banking. During his acceptance speech, he said, quote, it is fundamentally wrong for any great nation to willfully discriminate against such a large group of its people. One can say quite truthfully that on the battlefield, nobody is very interested in where the plasma comes from when they are hurt. Later, in that same speech, he said, quote, the blood is being sent from all parts of the world. It is unfortunate that such a worthwhile and scientific bit of work should have been hampered by such stupidity. The Federal Labor Standards Association thought Drew's opinion on the issue of segregating blood donations in and in response to them, he said, quote, I think the Army made a grievous mistake, a stupid error, in first issuing an order to the effect that blood for army should not be received from negroes. It was a bad mistake for three reasons. One, no official department of the federal government should willfully humiliate its citizens too, there is no scientific basis for the order, and three, they need the blood. The Red Cross finally ended its policy of segregating blood in nineteen fifty. In nineteen five, Charles Drew was awarded an honorary doctorate from Virginia State College, and Amber's College recognized him with an honorary doctorate two years later. He also became Freedman's Hospitals medical director in nineteen forty six, and that year he was also elected to the International College of Surgeons. In nineteen forty eight, Drew's first class of residents took their Board of Surgery exams, and he was really worried about it. He was confident in the education that they were getting at Howard, but he also knew that most of the other people taking the exams were from schools that were a lot richer and a lot more prestigious. His wife later relayed a story about getting a call from Howard President Mordechai Johnson after the board exams were over, telling her to tell Drew that one of his students had come in second place. Charlie was obviously totally over the moon about this, and then Leonora passed on the rest of the message, which was that one of his other students had come in first. I'm also crying, Holly and I are both crying the sweetest thing. Okay, let me collect myself for one moment. Drew had wanted to travel to the UK during the Blood for Britain program to see how things were going once the plasma arrived, but the State Department refused to issue him a passport on the grounds that his work was too important to put his life at risk in that way. But he did go overseas in as a consultant to the surge in General of the U. S. Army, touring hospitals in our pupied Europe. On March thirty one, fifty Charles Drew left Washington, d C. With three residents from Howard John R. Ford, Walter R. Johnson, and Samuel Bullock. They were headed for the annual meeting of the Johnny Andrew Clinical Society in Tuskegee, Alabama. They had planned to take turns driving through the night, stopping as little as possible since so many places were unsafe for black motorists. Today, Interstates and eighty five connect Washington, d C. To Tuskegee, but the Interstate Highway system hadn't been built yet, so they were really driving mostly along state and federal highways through rural areas. Drew had worked a long day at the hospital, spoken at a student council banquet, and done one last set of rounds before leaving Washington. A little before eight in the morning on April one, outside of Burlington, North Carolina, he fell asleep at the wheel. One of the other men called out to wake him up, and he overcorrected and lost control of the vehicle. Seat belts had been invented long before, but they were not standard in automobiles yet. Drew was thrown from the car, which rolled over him. Walter and Samuel were mostly unhurt, but john Ford was also thrown from the car and had a broken arm and other injuries. The four men were taken to Elament's General Hospital by an ambulance and in a car that was driven by a passer by. Multiple people on staff recognized Charles Drew, and soonwards spread through the hospital that doctor Drew from the blood bank had been badly hurt. Four surgeons were all part of Drew's care in the emergency room, George Carrington, Harald Coronodal S, his younger brother Charles Coronodal, and Ralph Brooks. Their treatments included giving Drew fluids and plasma, as the hospital didn't have a bank for whole blood. Meanwhile, Drew's colleagues started calling family and other doctors they knew in the area to tell them what had happened. See Mason Quick and remember Malloy, who had both trained at Howard drove in from Winston Salem, where they were practicing. But it was clear from the start that Drew was not likely to survive. His torso had been crushed and he had a serious brain injury. He died at ten ten a m. On April first, nineteen fifty, at the age of forty five, about an hour and a half after arriving at the emergency room. His cause of death was listed as one brain injury to internal hemorrhage, lungs three multiple extremities injuries. Almost immediately, rumors started to spread that Charles Drew had died not because his injuries were too severe, but because he had been denied care or refused blood because of his race. Within a couple of years, this belief was widespread. It came up again and again in everything from profiles of doctor Drew, to news reporting about developments in blood banking technology, even to a ninety three episode of the TV show Mash. It is an innately believable story, not just because of the bitter irony of a doctor who developed blood banking dying because he was refused blood, but also because black people really did die after being refused care at whites only hospitals, or turned away because all the beds that a hospital had set aside for black patients were often full. Multiple black doctors who were there at the hospital when Charles Drew died actively tried to dispel this rumor. They recognized that it reflected the realities of being a black person seeking medical treatment in the United States, but they also found it to be disrespectful to the doctors who had tried to save Drew's life and damaging to the medical system. Especially in the South, people cited it as a reason not to donate blood, like why do it if they're not going to give it to black patients. This room were also made it harder to recruit black doctors to practice in North Carolina, something that was already challenging, giving the racism and racist violence that a black doctor could expect to encounter while practicing there See Mason Quick said of all this quote, I'm a black man and this is my state. I know you can indict North Carolina for a number of things, but you can't indict her for this. Although Charles Drew is most remembered for his role in the development of blood banking, as we said earlier, he really considered the training of black surgeons to be his life's work. He trained more than half of the black surgeons who were certified in the US between nineteen forty one and his death in nineteen fifty. Many more who were certified after his death had been through part of their training under his guidance. Today, there are multiple schools named after Charles Drew, including the Charles AR Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, which is a historically black university that was found did In nineteen sixty six, a memorial marker was installed at the site of his car crash in and in he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame. His death was enormously tragic. His children, we're all little still at that point, and there's it was just a huge loss for the medical community in general, and the black medical community, especially especially at Howard. I also feel like there will be folks, including myself, who see a parallel between the Red Crosses exclusion of black donors during World War Two and the exclusion of of men who have sex with men today, with a key difference which that there was originally a reason to do that, which is, in the early days of the AIDS crisis, there was no test, like there wasn't a way to test the blood, and so with the knowledge that HIV was disproportionately spreading among men who have sex with men and no way to test the blood, like that policy made sense. It is not a Red a Red Cross policy, like I feel like the Red Cross gets a lot of criticism for it, but it's an FDA rule. The situation now, though, is totally different from what it was in the nineteen eighties. There are still a lot of different groups who see disproportionately higher risks for blood born illnesses. But we do have reliable tests now, we have had them for many, many, many years, and so this blanket exclusion is really discriminatory. At this point, and it's something that should have been really reassessed a long time ago, and there is currently a study that's going on right now to try to figure out a better way to assess an individual person's actual risk for blood born diseases, rather than having this blanket exclusion of men who have sex with men, which I think at this point is like a three month deferral, not a lifetime ban as it was originally back in the eighties when it was instituted. Well, you might talk more about that on Friday. Yeah, I wanted to note it now just because I know there will be folks who were like, Hey, this, Why didn't they mention it? That seems big? Uh? Do you also have listener mail for us? I do? I actually have a very quick comment from Facebook from sharene I hope I have said that correctly. Who said great episode. Regarding our penicillin episode, it reminded me of my great aunt's story from World War Two. She was a nurse serving in the U. S. Army in England. One day a serviceman came into the hospital with a sexually transmitted disease and he thought he was going to die. The nurses hooked him up to a large bag of penicillin. He survived his ordeal, and after the war wrote to the nurses that cared for him, thanking them and sharing that he had been I'm a priest. Then there's a smiley emoji. My great aunt always said penicillin was a miracle drug and was so grateful for its use during the war and after thanks for sharing the history. Thank you so much for leaving us this comment UM, mostly because we said in that episode that there was a whole sort of debate about um about when best to use penicillin during the war, whether it was better to get people who had a minor illness or sexually transmitted infection back two duty for people who were more grievously injured and wanted to be going home into having a somebody had a personal connection to that thought. That's interesting. So if you would like to send us a note. Where a history podcast that I Heart radio dot com. We're also all over social media ad miss in History, which is where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, in Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I Heart Radio app and wherever else you like to get podcasts m stuff. You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H