11/10/2025
In a delivery room in New York City, 1952, a baby was born blue and silent. The doctor looked up, unsure whether to begin resuscitation or move on. Then a voice cut through the panic â calm, firm, and precise.
âLetâs score the baby,â said Dr. Virginia Apgar.
In that moment, a quiet revolution in medicine began.
Virginia Apgar was not supposed to be there. In the 1940s, medicine was still very much a manâs world. Women doctors were often pushed aside, told to study pediatrics or research, anything but surgery. Apgar had dreamed of becoming a surgeon, but after years of fighting for recognition, she was told that no hospital would hire a woman in that field. So she chose anesthesiology instead â and in doing so, changed the world.
Working in the delivery wards of Columbia University Hospital, Apgar began noticing a heartbreaking pattern. Babies were dying within minutes of birth, and doctors had no clear system for deciding which ones needed urgent help. âWe lose too many,â she said. âAnd too often, no one knows why.â
So one morning in 1952, she took out a pen, a piece of paper, and created a simple, five-point test. It measured a newbornâs heart rate, breathing, muscle tone, reflexes, and skin color â each scored from zero to two. A total score above seven meant the baby was healthy. Below seven meant the baby needed help â fast.
She called it the Apgar Score.
What started as one womanâs handwritten chart quickly spread around the world. Within a decade, every hospital in America was using her system. Infant mortality rates began to drop sharply. Doctors had a language for assessing newborns. Babies who once would have been left for lost were suddenly being saved â by the thousands, then the millions.
Virginia Apgar didnât stop there. She went on to earn a public health degree, join the March of Dimes Foundation, and become a fierce advocate for maternal care. She gave speeches, wrote books, and used her sharp humor to disarm the men who had once dismissed her. When asked how she had succeeded in a male-dominated field, she smiled and said,
âWomen are like tea bags. They donât know how strong they are until theyâre in hot water.â
Dr. Apgar passed away in 1974, but her work never stopped saving lives. Every two seconds, somewhere in the world, a baby takes its first breath â and a nurse, a doctor, or a midwife quietly calls out a number. That number is the Apgar Score, named for the woman who refused to give up on newborns, or on herself.
