One Blood The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew. By Spencie Love. Illustrated. 373 pp. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. $29.95.
Spencie Love has written a moving and important book on race relations in America. She enters this murky world through the life, death and legend of Dr. Charles R. Drew, a gifted black surgeon and pioneer researcher on blood plasma who died following an automobile accident in rural North Carolina in 1950.
Dr. Drew's death became the source of a powerful and persistent myth among African-Americans: the "father of the blood bank" had bled to death after the local white hospital refused to treat him because of his race. The author's dissection of this legend and of the reasons for its remarkable longevity is masterly. She demonstrates in clear and convincing fashion that this myth, though inaccurate, still reveals an inner core of truth about what it meant to be black in the era of racial segregation.
Dr. Drew's career is fascinating on many levels. Born in 1904 into a middle-class family in Washington, he graduated from the legendary Dunbar High School, went on to Amherst College, took his medical degree in Canada at McGill University and received the degree of doctor of medical science from Columbia in 1940. During his years at Columbia, he became the first black surgical resident at Presbyterian Hospital.
His research and dissertation, "Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation," led directly to two high-profile positions in 1940-41. First, he took charge of the Blood for Britain project, which was attempting to prepare and ship substantial quantities of liquid plasma to Britain in the early months of World War II. His outstanding performance brought him his next post: medical director of the first American Red Cross blood bank, located in New York City.
Again, Drew performed brilliantly. He was instrumental in setting up a model program for collecting blood and processing it into dried plasma, the form preferred by the American military for overseas shipment and ready battlefield availability. His work helped save untold lives during the war and, in the opinion of the author, made him the most important single figure in this complex scientific enterprise.
Drew's first love was surgery, however, and in October 1941 he returned to Washington to head the department of surgery at Howard University Medical School. He became a "leader to a rising generation of black doctors," the author notes. Between 1941 and 1950, over half of the African-American surgeons receiving board certification in the United States studied under his direct supervision. Drew's reaction when he learns that his first two graduate students in surgery have finished first and second in their certification exams is one of the most moving moments in this absorbing book.
In youth Drew did not actively seek a confrontation with American racism. He believed, as Booker T. Washington had argued, that demonstrated success in demanding fields was the best challenge to prejudice; in a very real sense, his life was his protest. But he was unable to sidestep controversy indefinitely. In late 1941 and early 1942, the Red Cross, under pressure from the military, first moved to exclude black donors from the national blood program and then agreed to accept black blood but to segregate it.
"As you know, there is no scientific basis for the separation of the bloods of different races except on the basis of individual blood types or groups," Drew wrote in 1942. Wounded soldiers needed blood, black donors could help provide it, and it was wrong for the government to "willfully humiliate its citizens." On the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi called Drew and the other critics of the Red Cross policy "crackpots," "Communists," "parlor pinks" and "fellow travelers" who were "trying to mongrelize this nation." Drew continued his protests and broadened his attack to include other forms of discrimination, like the American Medical Association's policy of excluding black doctors.
On April 1, 1950, Drew and three other black doctors from Howard were driving through Alamance County, N.C., on their way to a medical conference, when Drew apparently fell asleep at the wheel. The car hit the shoulder going more than 70 miles per hour and rolled over; Drew suffered massive head and internal injuries. The others escaped largely unhurt.
Drew was taken by ambulance to the emergency room at Alamance General, a private hospital in Burlington, where white doctors worked with genuine dedication to save his life. Plasmas and intravenous fluids were administered, but his injuries were too severe; he died less than two hours after entering the hospital.
Why then the legend? Ms. Love, a historian who has taught at Duke and the University of Oregon, answers this question in part by recounting the events surrounding the death of another black man, Maltheus Avery, a student at North Carolina A & T State College, who was involved in a serious automobile accident in Alamance County on Dec. 1, 1950, eight months to the day after Dr. Drew died. Avery was refused treatment at Duke University Hospital in Durham "because Duke's 'black beds' were full." He was then taken to Durham's smaller and less well-equipped black hospital, where he died less than an hour after admission. In 1983, when the author interviewed Warmoth Gibbs, a former dean of A & T State, about Avery's death, he replied, "Wasn't he riding with Dr. Drew?"
The mythology surrounding Drew's death points to a chilling consequence of American racial prejudice. Blacks were denied admittance to white hospitals countless times, and they faced an acute shortage of beds in black hospitals or in the Jim Crow wards of segregated institutions; adequate medical treatment was the exception rather than the rule. "The Drew legend is not literally true, but it reveals a larger truth at the heart of black culture," Ms. Love writes; "it demonstrates the continuing psychological trauma of segregation and racism in American life." But Dr. Drew, in life and death, also bore witness to a more humane and, the author hopes, a more powerful truth: that in the end all of us are truly of "one blood." Her superb book may carry us a step or two closer to a recognition of that indisputable fact.