Virginia Apgar and the First Minutes of Life
How a simple score reshaped accountability and still challenges obstetrics to confront what it overlooks.
Virginia Apgar (1909–1974) was an American anesthesiologist whose work transformed the evaluation of newborns and reshaped expectations for obstetric accountability. Trained at Columbia-Presbyterian and later a leader in perinatal public health at the March of Dimes, she introduced the Apgar Score in 1953 as a standardized system for assessing newborn c…
