Biologics Regulation and ResearchThe People and Work of Buildings 29 & 29A

Madge L. Crouch was born in North Carolina and grew up in the New York Metropolitan 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., where 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's nursing department in Washington, D.C. from 1948 to 1965.

She came to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1965 and spent most of her 24 years there monitoring blood collection centers. In 1972 when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Division of Biologics Standards (DBS) moved administratively 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 Barker in 1975 on the storage, dating, and shelf life of red blood cell products. Towards the end of her career, she worked with her husband, Sam T. Gibson, in the Division of Biologics Evaluation.