Virginia Apgar

With the help of several scholarships, she attended Mt. Holyoke College, performing in the college orchestra as a gifted violinist and cellist and graduating with a major in zoology in 1929. Apgar entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University just before the Wall Street crash of October 1929, the beginning of the Great Depression. Despite financial problems, she graduated fourth in her class in 1933. Determined to become a surgeon, she won a surgical internship at Columbia and performed brilliantly. Because anesthesiology was not generally recognized as a specialty until the mid-1940s, Apgar struggled to find a training program when she completed her surgical residency in 1937. She spent six months training with Dr. Ralph Waters' department of anesthesia, the first in the United States, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She then spent six months with Dr. Ernest Rovenstine at Bellevue Hospital in New York. In 1938, Dr. Apgar returned to Columbia University as the director of the division of anesthesia and as an attending anesthetist. She began studying obstetrical anesthesia—the effects of anesthesia given to a mother during labor on her newborn baby—where she made her greatest contribution to the field, the Apgar Score. The score was presented in 1952 at a scientific meeting, and first published in 1953. Despite initial resistance, the score was eventually accepted and is now used throughout the world. In 1959, while on sabbatical leave, Apgar earned a master's degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins University. Deciding not to return to academic medicine, she devoted herself to the prevention of birth defects through public education and fundraising for research. She became the director of the division of congenital defects at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now the March of Dimes) and received many honors and awards for her work.