You're Dead to Me - Introducing Best Medicine - A Small Dose

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Best Medicine is your weekly dose of laughter, hope and incredible medicine. Award-winning comedian Kiri Pritchard-McLean is joined by a funny and fascinating panel of comedians, doctors, scientists, and historians to celebrate medicine’s inspiring past, present and future.Each week, Kiri challenges the panel to make a case for what they think is 'the best medicine', and each guest champions anything from world-changing science or an obscure invention, to an everyday treatment, an uplifting worldview, an unsung hero or a futuristic cure.In this clip, historian Subhadra Das celebrates the incredible medical pioneer of blood transfusion, Dr Charles Drew. If you enjoy this small dose, just search for Best Medicine on BBC Sounds where you can listen to the episode in full. It's Series 2, Episode 3 – where you’ll also hear comedian Laura Smyth, who discovered the importance of sleep as she underwent cancer treatment, plus Professor Lindsay Hall uses golden poo donors to cure serious infections and Professor Nicholas Embleton’s life is saved by a stem cell transplant. And there are loads more episodes to enjoy in the feed too.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince. He understands the nature of the universe. And so does Robin. Well, you know what? I do have my moments, especially after this new series, The Infinite Monkey Cage, because we are joined by experts at Bletchley Park,

who are talking about cyber warfare, an unexpected history of the body at the Royal Society, plus we'll be talking about de-extinction, elasticity and embryology. And there will be comedic interludes. And Pam Ayres on hedgehogs. I mean, she's not riding them. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, here she is. I'm Kiri Pritchett-McLean and I'm just hopping on this feed because I really want to tell

you about the second series of Best Medicine from BBC Radio 4. It's a comedy show that celebrates medicine's inspiring, funny and fascinating past, present and future. Now each week a load of top doctors, scientists, experts and comedians try to convince me what's the best medicine, whether it's futuristic origami surgical robots, life-changing pineapple UTI vaccines, Victorian scandal magazines, denial, sleep, life-saving stem cell transplants, gold poo donors,

or even crying, it's always something worth celebrating. Now, if you like what you hear in this dose, you can listen to loads more episodes by searching for best medicine on BBC Sounds. So, Padra, what do you think is the best medicine? So, Kiri, I think the best medicine is Dr Charles Drew. Okay, how do I take him? Once a week until the spark goes.

You're better than that, Curie. I'm not. I'm not. So who is Dr. Charles Drew? Well herein lies a tale. I'm curious to know who in the audience, just like a little show of hands, does this name ring a bell with anyone at all? No hands. Nothing. Nothing happening. Okay. His PhD was entitled Banked Blood. What he contributed to the world was the advances in technology and innovation

in terms of getting together huge quantities of blood for transfusion. He died in 1950. He died very sadly in a car accident because he was very tired and fell asleep at the wheel. Oooh. You're doing the work for me here, baby. He was only 45 years old when he died, so it's a very short life, but he packed a lot of things into that life. He was born in 1904 in a place called Foggy Bottom in Washington, DC. Love that. Just down the road from Merkey Gusset. That's the better one.

LAUGHTER And... LAUGHTER This is so much like being in one of my classes. LAUGHTER She's so close to separating us. LAUGHTER CHEERING He's one of these go-getting type people, we all know them. So even from a young age,

I think one of my favorite stories about him as a kid was he had a newspaper round and he ended up kind of creating a confederacy. So he was managing six other newspaper boys. And Charles Drew was the first black man to guess a PhD from Columbia University. So this is super impressive. The way blood transfusions used to work back in the day was actually person to person because blood clots. And so this was the best way to keep it fresh. And what Drew did in this PhD was a huge survey of all of the different techniques

for storing human blood for use. This became very important because this was happening in 1940. So the US hadn't joined the war yet but its ally was Britain. He got blood from 14 and a half thousand donors which was a total of five and a half thousand liters of plasma. This was another part of an innovation because blood plasma can be refrigerated and is generally a little bit safer in terms of Transfusion for disease. So was he the first person to be doing this at this scale? Yeah, so the technology exists

But because he's that go-getting guy the guy that gets the six newspaper boys in together in a syndicate This is the amazing skill that he is bringing to this project He was so successful that the American Red Cross brought him on board. Now here is his innovation. He invented blood mobiles. So the idea of... It's a very spicy episode of Pimp My Ride, that, isn't it? So he's now able to go mobile.

So he's able to collect on an even greater scale. The US is in the war by this point. The fact that he was able to do this saved thousands of lives of allied troops. Wow. He's a phenomenally important person in this. But history is gonna intervene. In April 1941, very soon after he had joined

the American Red Cross, Charles Drew quit. The story goes that he quit because they had made the decision that they were not going to be collecting blood from black donors, which is scientifically nonsense. Okay. There is no, there are blood types. That's really important. And some of that has been associated with ethnic groups, which is why if you are from

an ethnic minority in Britain, I really would encourage you to be a blood donor because there's never enough in terms of supply. But when it, we're talking about plasma and general blood transfusion, race does not come into it at all. And he spoke out against this publicly many, many times. Fairly shortly thereafter, the American Red Cross in 1942 said that it would be collecting blood from black donors, but it would be kept segregated. Oh my god. It's important to point out by the way that they did issue an apology in 2023. We're going on a better late than never principle. But also actually for my mind I've read a lot of these sorts of apologies this one's a relatively

good one. So to their credit they say today the Red Cross stands firm in its dedication to diversity and inclusivity and resoundingly rejects hate racism and bigotry of any kind Unfortunately, this is the sad bit in 1950. He works a full day in the hospital. He does surgeries in the afternoon He's the guest of honor at a dinner reception He and three of his colleagues got into a car and were driving to a conference in Tuskegee, Alabama. He took over the wheel at five in the morning. He was extraordinarily tired and fell asleep at the wheel. He was taken to hospital. They knew who he was.

That's how famous he was. He was treated in the basement because that is where you treat black patients in the day. And what I want to tell you about just in terms of the context, you've already heard about the segregation and the things that he was having to fight. The reason why he wasn't able to go to medical school was because of a thing called the Flexner Report that had said lots of black medical schools were substandard and had resulted in a lot of them closing, which is why he ends up going to Canada. He was having to fight his way through all of this. And so he's having to work twice as hard as every other doctor. And we already know the doctors work twice as hard as all of the rest of us. His daughters described him as a man in a hurry.

This is all they ever saw of their dad was him running around trying to help other people. Of course, he was going to fall asleep at the wheel of the car. What strikes me about that as well is that he was famous enough to be recognized in the hospital and none of us had heard of him. And I cannot believe you have dragged two idiot naughty school children in Laura and I to learning something that is in stunned silence. Incredible work there. So, Sepadra, why do you think Dr.

Charles Drew is the best medicine? Not only was he an amazing medical pioneer, but he brought an idea of collaboration as part of his philosophy for how he wanted to do medicine. He was anti-racist to the bone. He knew that solidarity was the way forward with this and it's important to point out he was a phenomenal teacher between 1941 and 1950 more than half of the black surgeons in the US who had qualified as surgeons studied under Charles Drew. Subhantra everyone. Hello I'm Brian Cox and I'm Robince. He understands the nature of the universe.

And so does Robin. Well, you know what? I do have my moments, especially after this new series, The Infinite Monkey Cage, because we are joined by experts at Bletchley Park who are talking about cyber warfare, an unexpected history of the body at the Royal Society. Plus, we'll be talking about de-extinction, elasticity and embryology. And there will be comedic interludes. And Pam Ayres on hedgehogs.

I mean, she's not riding them. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.