Submitted on Tuesday, 2/7/2023, at 1:07 PM

The Mayo Clinic News Network and Discover are among a number of media platforms paying tribute this February to Drew (1904–1950), a Black American surgeon and medical researcher known as the “father of blood banking.”

“Dr. Drew was a top student and athletic child who was accepted to Amherst College on an athletic scholarship,” the Mayo Clinic article notes, but “a football injury and his sisterʼs death during a city-wide influenza epidemic fostered his interest in medicine.” Dr. Jeffrey Winters goes on to describe “Dr. Drew’s critical research into optimizing and standardizing blood collections, creating large scale collection centers that provided blood products to the military, and the creation of mobile blood drives.”

Drew also makes Discover’s list of “8 Amazing Black Scientists and How They Changed History,” compiled by Monica Cull. His entry on the list outlines his education and career, pointing out that he was “the first Black man to earn a doctorate from Columbia University” and that he “became the first director of the American Red Cross but left the position after two years, outraged at the racial segregation of the blood they collected.”

Today, Drew is the namesake of Amherst College’s Black cultural theme house.