Dr. Charles Drew

Blood Plasma | Buillth — Never Forget

ARCHIVE NO. 004

Dr. Charles Drew didn't invent the blood bank — the first one opened in Chicago in 1937, before his research began. What he did do: revolutionize how blood plasma is processed, stored, and shipped at scale, building the wartime blood banking systems that saved untold lives and earned him the title "Father of the Blood Bank." Then the American Red Cross segregated the blood supply he built. He protested. History has been slow to catch up with what he actually did.

Who Was Charles Drew?

Charles Richard Drew was born in Washington, D.C. in 1904, the son of a carpet layer and a schoolteacher. He was an exceptional student and an exceptional athlete — a track and field star who won multiple scholarships, and a football player who could have pursued a professional athletic career. He chose medicine.

He graduated from Amherst College and was admitted to medical school, but faced the quota systems that limited Black enrollment at American medical schools. He went to McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he could train without those restrictions, and graduated near the top of his class. He returned to the United States and eventually pursued surgical residency training, but American medicine was segregated at every level — hospitals, residencies, professional societies. Drew navigated all of it with a combination of exceptional ability and sheer refusal to accept what the system told him he could aspire to.

He ended up at Columbia University for a fellowship in 1938, where he began the work that would define his legacy.

The Work That Changed Everything

The problem Drew tackled was one of the most pressing in emergency medicine: blood spoils. Whole blood, once drawn, had a usable shelf life of days. In emergency settings — battlefield hospitals, major accidents, mass casualty events — having a reliable supply of blood available was nearly impossible under those constraints. You needed the right blood type. You needed it fresh. You needed it now. The logistics were often fatal.

The world's first blood bank had already opened in 1937 at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, under physician Bernard Fantus, who coined the term. Drew's contribution came next, and it was what turned a single hospital's experiment into something that could operate at national and wartime scale. His research focused on blood plasma — the liquid portion of blood, separated from the red blood cells. Plasma doesn't require blood type matching. It stores for longer. It can be dried and reconstituted. It is the component of blood most immediately critical for treating shock and maintaining blood pressure in trauma patients.

Drew developed the science of large-scale plasma processing — how to separate it, how to store it, how to preserve and ship it reliably at scale. He directed the "Blood for Britain" project in 1940, which processed and shipped plasma to British hospitals during the Blitz — the first major test of blood banking at wartime scale. It worked.

He was then appointed to lead the American Red Cross's first large-scale blood bank program — the largest blood collection effort in American history to that point — and immediately began systematizing the process. His methods worked. The blood supply held. Soldiers survived injuries that would have been fatal in previous wars.

What History Did With His Name

The Red Cross, under pressure from the US military, instituted a policy of segregating blood donations by race — keeping Black-donated blood separate from white-donated blood. Drew — the man who had built the system — publicly protested that this policy had no scientific basis whatsoever. Blood is blood. He was ignored.

He resigned from the Red Cross directorship and returned to Howard University, where he built one of the premier surgical training programs in the country and trained a generation of Black surgeons who went on to distinguished careers.

He died in 1950, at 45, after a car accident in North Carolina. He received treatment at a nearby hospital. The story that he died because a white hospital refused to treat him — a story that circulated for decades — is not supported by evidence; he was treated, but his injuries were too severe. The fact that the story was so widely believed speaks to the racial environment he had lived and worked within.

Why It Still Matters

An estimated 118 million units of blood are donated globally every year. The blood banking system that manages that supply — the collection, testing, storage, and distribution infrastructure — is built on the large-scale methods Drew established. Every emergency room with a blood supply ready to use, every surgical team that can order blood during an operation, every trauma center that can resuscitate a crash victim — that capability traces back to what he built.

He didn't invent the blood bank. He's the reason it works at the scale that keeps the modern world alive.

Dr. Charles Drew is part of the Buillth Never Forget collection. His story is on the shirt. Now you know.

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Documented from Britannica and the National Library of Medicine.