Madge L. Crouch (1919–2004)

Madge L. Crouch was born in North Carolina and grew up in the New York/New Jersey area. She graduated from Methodist University’s nursing school in Brooklyn and completed a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Columbia University. She later received a master’s degree in personnel and business administration from George Washington University in 1961.

Crouch taught at Methodist Hospital for two years as a nurse before she joined the Naval Reserve Nurse Corps in 1944. She served on the USS Benevolence hospital ship at the end of WWII. She retired from the Reserves as a captain in 1979. She worked for the American Red Cross as the head of the blood program nursing department in Washington, D.C. from 1948 to 1965.

She came to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1965. She spent most of her 24 years at the FDA monitoring blood collection centers. In 1972 when the Division of Biologics Standards (DBS) moved administratively from the NIH to the FDA, Crouch joined others like Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, in the Division of Blood and Blood Products in Building 29 on the NIH campus. She published an article with Dr. Barker in 1975 on the storage of red blood cell products and their shelf life/dating. Towards the end of her career, she worked with her husband, Sam T. Gibson, in the Division of Biologics Evaluation.

She retired in 1989 as the deputy director of what was then, and remains to this day, called the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research’s (CBER) Office of Compliance and Biologics Quality.

She worked in Building 29, Room 129 in the 1980s in her administrative roles, and previously worked on the 3^rd floor when she was in the Division of Blood and Blood Products.