CHARLES RICHARD DREW

The supreme irony that the doctor who directed the Red Cross Blood Program in the early days of World War II was unacceptable as a contributor because he was a Negro does not make this stiff fictionalized biography a good book, but it does suggest that Charles Drew might be worth reading about. Before his untimely death in an auto accident, when he had decided to concentrate on surgery and surgical training, Dr. Drew remarked that he had two things to live down, the second being his connection with blood banks and especially with research establishing the practicality of using plasma as a substitute for whole blood. The first was his phenomenal athletic record--in high school, at Amherst, as a coach at little Morgan College. Turned down at Howard Medical School (another irony--he would later be Head of Surgery) for an English deficiency, he chose McGill over the American schools that accepted him in order to avoid the discrimination he had found even in the North; by this time, his resolve to raise the Negro in the medical profession was firm. There's a story here, even here--but not as much as there could be.