As I sat in my car at the traffic light that evening waiting for the light to turn green, I did a quick mental rundown of the last patient of the day—a fifty-seven-year-old man who’d undergone emergency cardiac surgery which got several shades more complicated due to unexpected bleeding. Fortunately, after four units of packed red blood cells and two units of plasma the bleeding subsided. However, poor Mr. Craxton—that was his name—couldn’t catch a break! Within twenty minutes of arriving in the intensive care unit, the hounds of Oblivion had caught up with him again as his blood pressure plummeted suddenly and all the alarms in his room went off in ominous cacophony. Charlie, his nurse, was yelling frantically: “It’s the Ancef! His blood pressure tanked the moment I pushed the drug. He’s got anaphylaxis!”. Three nurses and a respiratory therapist charged breathlessly into the room and within minutes Craxton’s blood pressure had rebounded after he received an emergency intravenous cocktail of epinephrine, antihistamines and steroids. Not long after, we were showering Charlie with plaudits for his keen observation and quick response. He’d practically saved the man’s life though admittedly after almost taking him out first with the Ancef—as Maria, his fellow nurse, drily observed—but how could he have known that Mr. Craxton was allergic to Ancef?
As the light turned green and the car rolled forward, I caught sight of the lustrous full moon straight ahead, its ethereal glow filling up the night sky. What a sight for sore eyes after another chaotic day in the ICU!
This passage represents a relatively ordinary day in the life of an ICU healthcare provider, but its purpose is to recognize five African-American scientists whose contributions left the world a better place:
Traffic Light: Garrett Morgan patented an electric three-position traffic signal and later sold the patent to General Electric for $40000, a large sum of money at the time. He also invented a safety hood that allowed the wearer to breathe in conditions with smoke and poisonous gases, which was used by many police and fire departments. The concept was later employed to develop the gas masks used by the military.
Cardiac surgery: Daniel Hale Williams in Chicago performed the first successful heart surgery on a stabbing victim in 1893, at a time when a procedure of the sort was considered unthinkable due to the risk of death from complications such as infection. Not only did the patient survive but he lived another fifty years, outliving his surgeon.
Packed cells and plasma: Charles Drew, a surgeon, pioneered the concept of separating red blood cells and plasma, allowing for longer storage—this research contributed to the development of modern blood banks. Under his direction,14,500 pints of life-saving plasma were used to treat wounded soldiers in the Battle of Britain (World War II). Drew became the first director of the American Red Cross but resigned after the military ruled that blood from African-Americans had to be stored separately from that of whites.
Steroids from soybeans: Percy Julian was a prolific organic chemist who in the 1930s discovered a method to extract progesterone and testosterone from soybeans on a commercial scale. His subsequent work on the synthesis of cortisone and hydrocortisone resulted in a drastic drop in the cost of this valuable category of steroid hormones previously only available in small quantities at great price from animal extracts. Derivatives of cortisone have found innumerable uses in the field of medicine in the decades since, including in the current treatment of COVID-19.
The Lady and the Moon: Katherine Johnson, featured in the movie “Hidden Figures” was one of the many brilliant “human computers”—primarily women—whose impeccable mathematical skills were used by NASA to calculate and analyze flight paths in space. So crucial was Johnson’s contribution that before astronaut John Glenn flew the Friendship 7 space shuttle in 1962—becoming the first American to orbit the earth—he asked that she double check the work of the electronic computers. Johnson was also involved in verifying the flight trajectory for the first moon landing.
This Black History Month, take time to consider the untold stories of the many African-Americans who worked with skill and dedication in different fields—enduring hardship and prejudice—for the benefit of all mankind.