Born in 1909, Bergen County woman created medical test that’s still used
You may not be familiar with Virginia Apgar, but her impact likely touched your life the moment you were born.
Best known for creating a simple test, the longtime Tenafly resident revolutionized the way newborns are assessed and treated. Yet she was born in 1909, when few medical schools even admitted women.
A Westfield native, Apgar came into a family where science and sadness intertwined. Her father was an amateur astronomer and electrician; one brother died of tuberculosis and another suffered from constant childhood illness. Amid that backdrop, she went on to study zoology and earned a medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1933.
Still, her ambitions found resistance. Despite excelling as a surgeon during her residency at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, Apgar encountered discouragement from Alan Whipple, the university’s department chair, who steered her pivot toward anesthesiology. The field of obstetric anesthesia was not formally recognized at the time. There was nonetheless great need, King-Thom Chung wrote in 2010’s Women Pioneers of Medical Research.
Chung, a late professor of microbiology and molecular toxicology at the University of Memphis, argued that Apgar was an excellent candidate for departmental chair and could have been a good surgeon. Still, she chose not to fight, Chung wrote. Instead, she freed herself from male-dominated administration by engaging in research rather than the feminist movement.
“She often said that ‘women were liberated from the time they were born,’” Chung wrote.
Her tenacity prevailed, propelling her to become the first woman to achieve a full professorship at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1949. While finding staff for her department provided another gender-based hardship, Apgar’s students helped her change the foundation of human healthcare.
During a lunchroom conversation in the early 1950s, a student asked Apgar how to properly evaluate a newborn’s health.
At the time, the standards for assessment were inadequate, Apgar once said. Newborns were generally taken from the delivery room to the nursery, and health problems often went unnoticed until becoming critical. To quickly evaluate newborns, Apgar jotted down a scoring system on a napkin. It was based on five signs: muscle tone, heart rate, respiration, reflexes and skin color. Honed during a collaborative study involving 17,221 babies, it became the “Apgar score” and started to provide doctors with impetus for rapid early treatments. Her name was even used as an acronym to help medical professionals remember: appearance, pulse, grimace, activity and respiration.
Touted as a contributor to neonatal survival rates, the score was first presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists in 1952 and published the following year. There was again resistance. Still, Apgar found a direct correlation between low scores and high mortality, and it ultimately became standard practice across the world to record oneminute and five-minute Apgar scores for each newborn.
Apgar spread the method locally. A resident of 30 Engle St. in Tenafly for decades, she was a consultant at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood and other area hospitals. Her work in delivery rooms helped her discover new ways to detect birth defects and brought her acclaim.
In 1959, Apgar was named the head of the March of Dimes Division of Congenital Deformations, a platform she used to educate doctors and parents about neonatal care. Two years later, the Bergen County March of Dimes named a new hybrid orchid in her honor.
Apgar never married, quipping that she hadn’t found a man who could cook. She did, however, take up many hobbies. She dabbled in still photography, vegetable gardening and stringed instruments, performing with the Teaneck Symphony Orchestra. She even built her own viola, violin, mezzo violin and cello as an early member of the Catgut Acoustical Society. Also a stamp collector from a young age, Apgar became the third woman physician honored with a commemorative U.S. Postal Service stamp in 1994, 20 years after her death from liver disease at age 65.
“She was an extraordinary woman of distinguished achievement who will be missed by both the medical community and the town in which she lived,” The Record’s editorial Staff wrote after her death.