Bookworm Review: Genius Unbroken: The Life and Legacy of Dr. Charles R. Drew

That’s the BeeGees song to remember, the song with the perfect cadence for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Each beat is a pump; each pump, a lifesaving action, which is handy information to know, if you ever need it. So now read “Genius Unbroken” by Craig A. Miller, MD, with Charlene Drew Jarvis, PhD, and meet the man whose legacy takes over when CPR isn’t enough.

Almost from the moment he could walk, Charles Richard “Charlie” Drew was an active boy.

Growing up in Washington DC’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, an area that was more equal than most in the early 1900s, gave him opportunity to explore his surroundings, to get a good education, to learn to swim and to excel at athletics.

Sports and music were his passions then, in fact. But when his younger sister, Elsie, died, and he incidentally learned while attending Amherst College that he enjoyed the study of biology, Charlie decided to be a doctor.

Sadly, there was no money for medical school. Still, he applied to Howard University School of Medicine, which turned him down so he went to work at Morgan College in Baltimore as a teacher before heading to Quebec, where he received a fellowship at McGill University to study medicine. He entered Howard in early 1935, for his residency.

In 1938, he was invited to Columbia University, to work as a fellow in surgery.

Eagerly, he took on extra projects, one of which was the nature of shock, a condition that could lead to circulatory failure and death. Laboratories everywhere were “were dedicated to studying the phenomenon in all its… physiologic complexity.” World War II was raging, banked blood would save a lot of lives, and Charlie set to work figuring out how to do it. But one of the questions was “whether to accept blood donated by African-Americans” like him …

How many times have you been warned not to judge a book by its cover? Probably a lot, so don’t do it here. The cover of “Genius Unbroken” isn’t colorful or splashy, yet this may be one of the more interesting books you read this fall. But it does have its bumps.

Authors Craig A. Miller, MD and Charlene Drew Jarvis, PhD belabor Charles Drew’s athletic expertise, and the tales of those exploits melt together in their similarities. It may be a safe bet that readers who pick up this book up will want the story of Drew’s accomplishments in medicine, instead of a litany of sports tales.

Fortunately, the rest of Drew’s life story and that of his career and his activism eventually become front-and-center here, and then you’ll be riveted. It helps that the authors are careful to explain the medical parts of the story in layman’s terms, making this a book you ultimately won’t want to put down.

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That “Genius Unbroken” becomes a lively biography is a nice surprise that will appeal to true medicine readers or Black history fans. Look for it, and you’ll know who to thank when you’re stayin’ alive.