Charles R. Drew (Black History Month Project)

Charles R. Drew

Background Information

Charles was born in June 3, 1904 in Washington D.C.,his parents was Richard Thomas Drew and Nora Rosella Burrell Drew. Richard worked as a carpet installer and Nora worked as a teacher.

Amanda Holmes

The death OF Charles R. Drew

In April 1, 1950, Charles was motoring with three

colleagues to the annual meeting of the John A. Andrews Association in Tuskegee, Alabama, when he was killed in a one-car accident. The automobile struck the soft shoulder of the road and overturned. Drew was severely injured and rushed to nearby Alamance County General Hospital in Burlington, North Carolina. In the words of his widow, "everything was done in his fight for life" by the medical staff. However, it was too late to save him.

Education

As a child Charles won several medals in swimming

medal in his elementary years. Charles soon played football, basketball, and other sports. Charles was very athletic . Charles graduated from Dunbar High School in 1922 and attended Amherst Collage in Massachusetts. He earned a Mossman trophy as the man who contributed the most years to athletics for 4 years.

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Collage Years

The NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal in 1944 in recognition of his work on the British and American projects. Virginia State College presented him an honorary doctor of science degree in 1945, as did his Alma mater Amherst in 1947.

Drew returned to Freedman's Hospital and Howard University where he served as a professor of medicine and surgeon from 1942 to 1950.

Charles soon taught biology and was a coach at Morgan State Collage in Baltimore, before he entered McGill University School of Medicine in Montreal. When Charles was a medical student he won a scholar and became an Alpha Omega Alpha Scholar and won the J. Francis Williams Fellowship, based on a competitive examination given annually to the top five students in his graduating class. Charles also received MD degree in 1933 and he also served first appointment as a faculty instructor in pathology at Howard University, from 1935 to 1936.

Charles' life at the hospital and military

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He then became an instructor in surgery and an assistant surgeon at Freedman's Hospital, a federally operated facility associated with Howard University. The military emergency of World War II had a demanding vital need for information and procedures o n how to preserve blood. When he European European war scene became more violent and the need for blood plasma intensified, Charles as the leading authority in the field, was selected as the full-time medical director of the Blood for Britain project. He supervised the successful collection of 14,500 pints of vital plasma for the British. In February 1941, Drew was appointed director of the first American Red Cross Blood Bank, in charge of blood for use by the U.S. Army and Navy.

In 1938, Drew was awarded a two-year Rockefeller fellowship in surgery and he began postgraduate work, earning his Doctor of Science in Surgery at Columbia University. His doctoral thesis, "Banked Blood" was based on an exhaustive study of blood preservation techniques. It was while he was engaged in research at Columbia's Presbyterian Hospital that his ultimate destiny in serving mankind Columbia University. Charles doctoral theses, ''Blood