THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603180179
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BROWN H. CARPENTER
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
ONE BLOOD
The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew
SPENCIE LOVE
University of North Carolina Press. 373 pp. $29.95.
With its 90 pages of footnotes and bibliography, One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew at first glance appears to offer yet another dry academic treatise on a long forgotten controversy.
Historian and journalist Spencie Love, however, has handled her subject with both fairness and passion. Her work sheds a great deal of light on the nation's struggle to come to terms with its racist heritage.
Love's focus is Dr. Charles R. Drew, a prominent black physician who was killed April 1, 1950, after an auto wreck in rural North Carolina.
After he died, rumors rapidly spread that the badly injured Drew had been rushed by ambulance to a small private hospital in Burlington, N.C., but because he was black he was refused admission. According to reports, Drew bled to death for lack of treatment in a segregated emergency room.
This story was especially ironic. Drew had done pioneer research in preparing blood plasma for storage and transfusion, and he had set up the first U.S. blood bank in the years before World War II.
Drew's fate was cited as an example of the cruel absurdities of the South's Jim Crow laws. His death became a legend, Love writes, reiterated over the years by civil rights leaders, journalists and even the scriptwriters of the ``M.A.S.H.'' television show.
(A similar legend envelops blues singer Bessie Smith, who died in 1937 in Mississippi after an auto accident.)
But, as the Drew family tried to explain from the beginning, the death did not happen that way. The white physicians, who recognized Charles Drew after he was brought to Almanance General Hospital, had tried hard to save his life. The hospital's rooms were segregated in 1950, but the emergency room was open to all patients. Drew's injuries were just too severe.
If Drew's death was not an indictment of racial segregation, his life certainly was, the author maintains. Brought up in a middle-class, educated family in Washington, D.C., he attended prestigious Amherst College. But only a handful of medical schools accepted African Americans in the 1930s.
Drew earned his medical degree at McGill University in Montreal, where he excelled. Discrimination reappeared upon graduation, however, when he confronted the limited number of internships and residencies for blacks. Drew talked his way into a ``bootleg'' residency at Presbyterian Hospital in New York that allowed him to make ward rounds unofficially.
He also began building a reputation that transcended his race. His work in blood research at Columbia University led to his appointment in 1940 as medical director of a hastily organized project to ship plasma to besieged Britain.
Later, Drew served as medical director of the first American Red Cross blood bank in New York, a pilot program that served as a model for blood donation facilities organized all over the United States.
``It was a rare opportunity indeed for a black scientist of Drew's day,'' Love writes, ``when techniques of separating plasma from whole blood and the science of blood-banking itself were still in their infancy.''
After Drew returned to his work at Howard University in Washington in 1941, the Red Cross announced that its blood banks would accept no donations from blacks. An outcry from African Americans led to blood from blacks being accepted, but segregated - both the Army and Navy agreed to this policy - so it would not be given to white servicemen.
Drew quietly protested this absurdity, but it would be a decade before the courts began striking down segregation laws and policies.
Another point Love makes is that the rumors about Drew's death were believed by blacks because they fit the pattern of their experience. Health facilities were segregated; Negro physicians were few and hospitals reserved for blacks were ill-equipped and understaffed.
In an incredible coincidence, on Dec. 1, 1950 - just eight months after Drew's death - college student and military veteran Maltheus Avery wrecked his car in the same county and was taken to the same hospital. The emergency room doctors sent Avery to nearby Duke University Hospital, where he was refused treatment and subsequently died.
This abominable act of malpractice also received a lot of attention in the black newspapers of the day and likely became entwined with the Drew legend.
Love devotes too much space to this incident, drawing attention away from Drew, whose life - and potential - is a revelation to those who may have forgotten the days before the Warren Supreme Court and the civil rights protests.
Drew ``was a quintessentially American hero by any measure,'' the author says, ``but because he was black, he could not reap the benefits similar efforts would have brought a white man.'' MEMO: Brown H. Carpenter is a staff editor. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Legend claims Dr. Charles S. Drew died when doctors refused to treat
him after an automobile accident.
by CNB