Virginia Apgar

Her father built things in the basement. Charles Apgar was a business executive with a telescope and an amateur radio set, and his recordings of a German station on Long Island exposed an espionage operation in the First World War. Music ran through the house. Virginia played the violin and never stopped carrying it. She was the only one of three children to escape illness — one brother died of tuberculosis and the other was chronically sick — and she settled early on medicine. Mount Holyoke took her in 1925 and she left in 1929 with zoology, physiology and chemistry. At Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons she was one of nine women in a class of 90, finished fourth in 1933, and completed a surgical residency there in 1937.

Allen Whipple, who ran surgery at Columbia-Presbyterian, told her women did not last as surgeons and pushed her toward anesthesia, which was barely a specialty yet. She trained six months under Ralph Waters at Wisconsin, in the first anesthesiology department in the country, where a 1937 group photograph shows her as the only woman among 16 men, then six months under Emery Rovenstine at Bellevue, and came back in 1938 to run Columbia's new anesthesia division. Infant mortality had been falling for two decades, but deaths in the first day of life had not moved. Asked by an obstetrical resident what a newborn examination ought to cover, she wrote five categories on a napkin: appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, respiration. Two points each, scored at one minute and again at five. She published it in 1953.

She had built that division in 1938 and run it for 11 years, and when Columbia finally made anesthesiology a department in 1949 the chair went to her colleague Emanuel Papper. The reason given was that she had done clinical work instead of research. She was made a full professor instead, the first woman ever to hold that rank at Physicians and Surgeons, and she stayed 10 more years before leaving in 1959 for a public health degree at Johns Hopkins and 15 years at the March of Dimes. The scoring system that carries her name was published four years after the job went to somebody else. She never married. She died of cirrhosis at 65, in the medical center where she had spent almost her whole career.

She was buried at Fairview Cemetery in Westfield, near the house she grew up in. The test settled what her research record could not. It is applied to nearly every child born in an American hospital, and her surname is now spoken in delivery rooms as a number rather than a person. A 20-cent stamp came in 1994, the National Women's Hall of Fame in November 1995, New Jersey in 2020. The hobbies stayed odd to the end. During the 1950s she and a friend made two violins, a viola and a cello, one instrument built from an old telephone shelf, and in her fifties she took flying lessons and said she meant to go under the George Washington Bridge.

Virginia Apgar's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Columbia anesthesia division company
  She built it from nothing and directed it for 11 years 1938
• The Apgar score invention
  Five categories, two points each, taken at one minute and at five 1952
• A Proposal for a New Method of Evaluation of the Newborn Infant article
  Current Researches in Anesthesia and Analgesia 1953
• March of Dimes birth defects research program other
  She directed it for 15 years and put premature birth on its agenda 1959
• Is My Baby All Right? book
  Written with Joan Beck 1972

• 1929 aged ~20 Graduates from Mount Holyoke in zoology
• 1933 aged ~24 Finishes fourth in her class at Columbia P&S She was one of nine women among 90 students.
• 1937 aged ~28 Completes a surgical residency and is steered into anesthesiology Allen Whipple told her he had watched women fail as surgeons.
• 1938 aged ~29 Returns to Columbia to head the new anesthesia division The first woman to lead a specialty division there.
• 1949 aged ~40 Passed over for the department chair and made a full professor Emanuel Papper got the chair. She was the first woman professor at P&S.
• 1953 aged ~44 Publishes the newborn scoring system Babies scoring two or less died at 14 percent. Babies scoring eight or better died at 0.13 percent.
• 1959 aged ~50 Takes a public health degree at Johns Hopkins and joins the March of Dimes
• August 7, 1974 aged 65 Dies of cirrhosis at Columbia-Presbyterian
• 1994 aged ~85 The Post Office issues a 20-cent Great Americans stamp

• Elizabeth Blackwell 1821–1910
  First woman to receive a medical degree in the United States and a pioneer of women’s medical education. won the award named for her
• Jonas Salk 1914–1995
  Medical researcher who developed the first safe and effective polio vaccine. funded by the same foundation she later directed
• Benjamin Spock 1903–1998
  Pediatrician whose 1946 baby-care manual reshaped postwar American child-rearing advice. remade American infant care in the same years
• Clara Barton 1821–1912
  Civil War nurse who founded the American Red Cross and pioneered disaster relief in America. earlier woman who built an institution in American medicine