Known not only as one of Columbia University’s first
female M.D.’s (1933), Virginia Apgar went on to specialize in surgery, a
male-dominated area of medicine. Virginia
became tired of the chauvinism she experienced during her internship and
switched her focus to anesthesiology, a relatively unknown medical field.
In 1949, she was appointed as a full professor of anesthesiology at
Columbia, another trailblazing event.
Her research on newborns and anesthesiology led her in
1949 to developing the Newborn Scoring System, also known as the “Apgar
Score”, to evaluate the wellness of babies.
She revised and published it further in 1952. Up until that time newborns were given a cursory glance,
counting fingers and toes, and often, internal defects of the circulatory or
respiratory systems were overlooked. Virginia
knew that birth is often the most dangerous time for a person, and devised a
method for quickly assessing the overall health of the child.
In the scoring criteria, two points is the highest score
for each of five areas: respiratory effort, reflex irritability, muscle tone,
heart rate, and color. The
physician conducts the exam one to five minutes after birth and fifteen minutes
after birth in Cesarean sections. A
perfect score of ten is rare, but a score of seven will identify a normal,
healthy baby. A low score will
alert doctors about possible problems like hemorrhaging or asphyxia which can be
immediately treated.
The Apgar Scoring Method has become a worldwide criteria
for quickly assessing newborn health. Virginia
Apgar went on to work as the Director of the March of Dimes in 1959, which
continued her interest in providing care for babies and young children.
At her death in 1974, she will be remembered for her great contributions
toward medicine and babies worldwide.
