Virginia Apgar

Virginia was inspired by her father’s scientific hobbies and her eldest brother’s early death from tuberculosis, and another brother’s chronic childhood illness. After graduating from high school she attended Mt. Holyoke College. In 1929 she graduated with a major in zoology. 1929 Apgar entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. She graduated fourth in her class in 1933. Dr. Alan Whipple discouraged Apagr from continuing her career because other women he had trained in the surgical field failed to establish successful careers. Because anesthesiology was not recognized as a specialty until the mid-1940s, Apgar struggled to find a training program. Despite this Apgar continued with her career in surgical residency. She trained with Dr. Ralph Waters for six months at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1938, Dr. Apgar returned to Columbia University as the director of the division of anesthesia and as an attending anesthetist. She had trouble recruiting physicians to work for her, because they didn’t accept anesthesiologists as equals. In 1949, when anesthesia research became an academic department, Dr. Apgar was appointed the first woman full professor at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. 

 She began to studying obstetrical anesthesia, which are the effects of anesthesia given to a mother during labor on her newborn baby. She made her greatest contribution to the field with the Apgar Score. This was the first standardized method for evaluating the newborn’s transition to life outside the womb. There are five points-heart rate, respiratory effort, muscle tone, reflex response, and color-are observed and given 0,1 or2 points. The points are then totaled for the baby’s score. The score was presented in 1952 at a scientific meeting and published in 1953. Eventually, the one- and five-minute Apgar Score became the standard procedure used for newborns. In 1959, while on leave, Apgar earned a master’s degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins University. She decided not to return to academic medicine, she devoted herself to the prevention of birth defects through public education and fund-raising for research. She became the director of the division of congenital defects at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now known as the March of Dimes). 

Info from: http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blapgar.htm;
http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/CP/