Shaw

This guide to Shaw in Washington, D.C. follows Charles Drew, a surgeon at Freedmen's Hospital who discovered that blood plasma could be dried and shipped where whole blood could not, and traces how that discovery ran Blood for Britain during World War II and helped build the Red Cross's refrigerated bloodmobile. It also reaches back to Alexander Augusta, the first Black physician to lead a hospital anywhere in the country, and to the neighborhood's origins as a camp for freedpeople who had walked into wartime Washington with nothing. Stand near Twelfth and R streets, where that hospital once stood.