One Blood, More Books

Thoughts on Dr. Charles Drew and text-only books

I learnt about blood typing from a cheaply printed textbook, which had few images, most of which were diagrams. If there was a photo it was too grainy to be identified properly.

So if we Indian kids read about Dr. Charles Drew, we never knew if he was black, or white, or whatever. In our minds everybody, be it Karl Landsteiner, Bernoulli, or Schleiden Schwann, Leibnitz, Rutherford, or Robert Hooke or Wurtz — any scientist who did something — was a person. A famous person. Not black or white. We knew they weren’t Hindu, except Ramanujan, or Bose, or Raman. That much the name itself told. We didn’t wonder, as children studying those sepia yellow books, what the scientists looked like. We’d just learn what they did, and wonder how the idea must have struck them, and how they must have leaped in the air when it finally all came together.

When I first read Harry Potter, I didn’t think of Lee Jordan as black, or Seamus Finnegan as Irish. It simply didn’t register like that. The movies made me peer at what my daughters — infidels! They prefer the movie! — were watching. Rowling said it better than the movie showed it.

That is the way to read. Books were so rare, and gobbling them so fulfilling, it made you dream, and imagine, and put yourself in the scientists’ place — why would you mar such wholesome fare with artificial colors?

Dr. Charles Drew must have died because the Whites didn’t give him a blood transfusion! Him, the pioneer in blood banking. WELL, NO. It didn’t happen like that.

Thank you Marilyn Flower for sending me this link where Dr. David Pilgrim clarified two points.

• Dr. Charles Drew, blood banking pioneer, didn’t die from not receiving a blood transfusion. He died because his injuries were too severe.
• Dr. Charles Drew resigned from the American blood bank because they were such pigs that they wanted to segregate black and white blood.

That made me want to jump up on their backs and pull at their hair.

Dr. David Pilgrim’s article made me think, right away – what if?

What if they had segregated the blood, and the white patient on the table was gonna die, and the correct blood group was available, but only in black blood. Then? Would the white patient be allowed to die?

What if the situation was reversed?

One Blood

Blood was already segregated as A+, A-, B+, B-, AB+, AB-, O+ and O-. It was too complicated to also add another way to segregate the blood that could not be tested simply on a glass slide. In the end, they couldn’t tell the difference.

Plasma must have been even more fun. Plasma does not even have a blood group to tell it apart, like “this A+ blood came from the black patient and this O+ blood came from the white one”

So they gave up.

We’re all going to have to become the Planet of the Blind before racism goes away.

If you had a book which had color pictures to go with the text, that’s lovely, sigh. With glossy pages. We used to console ourselves about that. Glossy pages were more difficult to underline on. Glossy page editions were heavier and would have been more difficult to lug to school and back in our school bags. Still, whenever I got my hands on a book like that, all heavy and hard bound, I would hold it up to my face and feel the different texture against the smoother skin of my cheek. My brother caught me doing this and said I was bonkers. He said I looked like someone petting a dog. Where I was the dog and the book was the one doing the petting.

I studied at a smorgasbord of schools, mostly free government schools. My parents could afford to send me to fancier schools, but my righteous dad would always get posted to some remote area where there was just the one school, take it or leave it. I got caught up in machinery that made my daily doses of reading mightily difficult to procure. My parents didn’t help at all, asking me to catch up in Math and Hindi instead. My mom said I already read WAY too much, and access to a library would tip me over the edge, like giving a drunkard the keys to the tavern.

Here’s another article by Tooth Truth Roopa Vikesh that you might like.