06/11/2026
A name heard in delivery rooms around the world began with one woman’s compassion.
Born this week in 1909, Dr. Virginia Apgar became the physician whose simple newborn assessment helped transform infant care around the world. She pursued science at Mount Holyoke College, earned her medical degree from Columbia University, and later completed a Master of Public Health at Johns Hopkins.
At a time when women in medicine faced limited opportunities, Dr. Apgar kept pressing forward. She became a leader in anesthesiology, the first woman appointed full professor at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the creator of the Apgar Score, a quick check of a newborn’s heart rate, breathing, muscle tone, reflexes, and color.
Her work gave doctors and nurses a clearer way to recognize babies who needed urgent help in their first moments of life. Later, through the March of Dimes, she continued serving families by advocating for research, prevention, and awareness around birth defects and premature birth.
Her legacy reminds us that education, courage, and compassion can save generations.
Read more about her 👇
Somewhere in the world, roughly four babies are born every second -- and within a minute of most of those births, a nurse or doctor gives the newborn a number from zero to ten. That number is called the Apgar score, and it is one of the most widely used medical assessments on earth: administered to hundreds of millions of infants across more than seventy years, in delivery rooms on nearly every continent, very likely including the room where you took your first breath. But few of the parents, nurses, and doctors who use that score every day realize that Apgar was not a medical term at all. It was a woman.
Her name was Virginia Apgar, and she invented that test because she could not stand to watch babies die. In the delivery rooms of the 1940s, when a newborn arrived limp and blue and silent, doctors turned their attention to the mother and let the infant slip away. As her colleague Melinda Beck later put it, babies who were "small and struggling were often left to die, since doctors assumed little could be done for them." Apgar thought that was unforgivable. She carried resuscitation equipment with her wherever she went, and she lived by a single fierce rule: "Nobody, but nobody, is going to stop breathing on me."
Apgar was born on this day in 1909 in Westfield, New Jersey, into a family she said "never sat down." Her father chased his curiosity through the night -- building a telescope, tinkering with wireless radio, filling the house with music -- and his restlessness ran straight through his daughter. She played violin from childhood and excelled at science in an era when girls were steered toward home economics, a subject at which she cheerfully flopped.
By the time she graduated from Mount Holyoke, where she juggled zoology, sports teams, the college newspaper, and the orchestra all at once, a teacher had already asked the question that would follow her through life: "Frankly, how does she do it?"
She enrolled at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1929, one of a handful of women in her class, and earned her medical degree in 1933. Her ambition was surgery. But the chairman of surgery, Allen Whipple, steered her elsewhere -- not because she lacked the skill, but because he had watched the women he trained as surgeons fail to find work in a field that would not hire them. He pointed her instead toward a new and unglamorous specialty that most physicians dismissed as the province of nurses: anesthesiology.
It was a slight, and it became an opening. Apgar threw herself into the young field, and in 1949 she became the first woman ever appointed a full professor at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons. Her work in obstetric anesthesia placed her in the delivery room again and again, where what she saw disturbed her: there was no standard, no system, no agreed-upon way to tell whether a newborn was thriving or in danger. The healthy and the imperiled were treated alike, and the babies who might have been saved were too often the ones nobody thought to examine at all.
The solution arrived almost offhandedly. A medical student asked her one morning how a newborn's health might be assessed, and Apgar answered, "That's easy." She reached for the nearest scrap of paper and jotted down five things that could be checked in the first minute of life: heart rate, breathing, reflexes, muscle tone, and color. Then she carried the list down to the delivery room and began testing it on infants herself. Each sign earned a score of zero, one, or two, added into a single number from zero to ten. First presented in 1952, the system soon became known the world over by her own name -- and, fittingly, as a mnemonic spelling it out: Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration.
Its power lay in its simplicity. A score could be taken in seconds by anyone, anywhere, and it forced the medical team to do the one thing that had never been required of them: to stop and truly look at the baby. Apgar proved that the numbers predicted survival -- infants who scored lowest died at many times the rate of those who scored high -- and in doing so she turned the newborn into a patient in its own right. As one tribute would later put it, "every baby born in a modern hospital is looked at first through the eyes of Virginia Apgar."
The score's influence ran deeper still. In the words of Columbia University, where she spent most of her career, the Apgar score "catalyzed the establishment of the subspecialties of perinatology and neonatology, the development of neonatal intensive care units, and the entire field of neonatal research."
The score would have been a life's work for most people. For Apgar, it was a midpoint. In 1959, at fifty, she earned a master's degree in public health and joined the March of Dimes, where she spent the rest of her career battling birth defects, championing the prevention of premature birth, and -- during the rubella epidemic of the 1960s -- urging the universal vaccination that could keep the disease from devastating babies in the womb.
She wrote a book, "Is My Baby All Right?", that brought birth defects out of the shadows of shame and into frank, compassionate daylight. Along the way she built four stringed instruments by hand, took up flying lessons in her fifties, and, asked why she had never married, replied that she simply hadn't "found a man who can cook."
Virginia Apgar died in 1974, at sixty-five. She had no children of her own, yet she had reached more newborns than any mother in history.
Nobody, but nobody, was going to stop breathing on her.
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To share Dr. Apgar's inspiring story with young readers, the lively picture book "Virginia Wouldn't Slow Down! The Unstoppable Dr. Apgar and Her Life-Saving Invention" is a wonderful introduction for ages 5 to 9, at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781324003939 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3RVD6xo (Amazon)
There is also an early chapter-book biography, "She Persisted: Virginia Apgar" for ages 6 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/she-persisted-virginia-apgar
Virginia Apgar's story is also told in the picture book "She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World" for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/she-persisted), "Girls Think of Everything" for ages 8 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/girls-think-of-everything), and "Trailblazers: 33 Women in Science Who Changed the World" for ages 10 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/trailblazers-33-women-in-science)
For teens and adults, she's also featured in the books "Bold Women of Medicine" (https://www.amightygirl.com/bold-women-of-medicine) and "Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science – And The World" (https://www.amightygirl.com/headstrong-52-women)
For children's books about more trailblazing women of science, visit our blog post "60 Books to Inspire Science-Loving Mighty Girls," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=13914
To encourage your Mighty Girl's love of science at every age, you can find many empowering science toys and kits in our blog post "Top Science Toys and Kits for Mighty Girls" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=10528
