17/10/2025
Dr Virgina Apgar! Her simple score for a baby at 1 minute of age, is still used, exactly as it was created 70 years ago. Tell me! What else in medicine is exactly as it was 70 years ago?
A baby born blue and silent. Doctors frozen in panic. Then one woman said five words that would save 50 million lives."Let's score the baby."It was 1952, inside a New York City delivery room, and Dr. Virginia Apgar had just changed medicine forever—though no one knew it yet.Apgar had dreamed of becoming a surgeon. She had the skill, the drive, and the brilliant mind for it. But in the 1940s, hospital doors stayed locked for women who wanted to hold scalpels. After being told point-blank that no hospital would hire a female surgeon, she made a choice: if they wouldn't let her into the operating room, she'd find another way to save lives.She turned to anesthesiology—and ended up exactly where she was meant to be.Working in Columbia-Presbyterian's maternity ward, Apgar witnessed something that haunted her: newborns dying within minutes of birth, while doctors stood helpless, unsure which babies needed urgent care and which would recover on their own. There was no system. No standard. Just chaos and heartbreak.So one morning over breakfast, she grabbed a napkin and designed a test. Five simple measurements: heart rate, breathing, muscle tone, reflex response, and skin color. Zero to ten points. Two minutes to assess. One score that could mean the difference between life and death.She called it the Apgar Score.Within a decade, nearly every hospital in America was using it. Infant mortality plummeted. Babies who would have been left to die were suddenly being resuscitated. Doctors finally had a universal language for newborn care—and it came from a woman they'd told couldn't be a surgeon.But Apgar didn't stop there. She earned a master's in public health at 50, joined the March of Dimes, and spent the rest of her life fighting for mothers and babies worldwide. She became one of the most powerful voices in maternal and infant health—the job they said she'd never have.When someone asked how she thrived in a world that didn't want her, she smiled and said: "Women are like tea bags—you don't know how strong they are until they're in hot water."Dr. Virginia Apgar died in 1974, but her legacy breathes in every delivery room on Earth. Every two seconds, somewhere in the world, a newborn takes their first breath while someone calls out a score.A score that honors the woman who refused to accept "no"—and who turned rejection into a gift that keeps on giving, one breath at a time.
