what do you know about (Dr.) Apgar?

Her score, that is...From acronym to the woman behind the innovation, here's Melinda Beck in the WSJ with a brief biography of Dr. Apgar and her most famous contribution to medicine...

In the 1950s, babies...were given a new score a minute after birth to assess how well they made the transition from womb to room. Today, the Apgar score is still given to nearly every baby born in a hospital world-wide.

Many parents know Apgar as an acronym for what it measures: Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity and Respiration. But the score was first named for Virginia Apgar, the gutsy anesthesiologist who, in 1949, scribbled it on the back of a card in a hospital cafeteria...

The score laid the foundation for the field of neonatology, and Dr. Apgar became a legendary figure in medicine. She died in 1974. She would have been 100 years old next month....

The score came about, indirectly, because of the sexism long rampant in medicine....She excelled at surgery, but a mentor convinced her she'd never make a living that way. "Even women won't go to a woman surgeon," Dr. Apgar said.

She went into anesthesiology and helped build it into a medical specialty. But she was passed over for a man to head the new department at Columbia. So she threw herself into teaching and patient care, becoming the first woman full professor at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons. She was particularly drawn to obstetrical anesthesia, and was increasingly concerned about what she saw.

As late as the 1940s, delivery-room doctors focused on mothers and paid little attention to babies. Those who were small or struggling were often left to die, since doctors assumed little could be done for them....

In the cafeteria one morning, a med student asked Dr. Apgar how a newborn might be evaluated. "That's easy, you'd do it like this," she said, dashing down heart rate, respiration, muscle tone, color and reflexes. Then she rushed off to try it, according to Selma Calmes, a retired anesthesiologist who has written about her. After testing the score on more than 1,000 newborns, Dr. Apgar presented it at a conference in 1952 and it caught on quickly.

As simple as it was, the score transformed deliveries by requiring staffers to carefully observe and assess each baby, assigning a score of 0, 1 or 2 to each of the five categories. Then, as now, few babies get a perfect 10 one minute after birth, since most have bluish toes and fingers until oxygenated blood starts circulating fully....

Most importantly, babies who needed care started to get it, gradually spurring the development of newborn-size resuscitation tools, infant heart-rate monitors and neonatal intensive-care units. Thanks to all those efforts, and the philosophy that came with them, U.S. infant mortality dropped from 58 per 1,000 in the 1930s to 7 per 1,000 today. By the 1970s, it was said, "every baby born in a hospital around the world is looked at first through the eyes of Virginia Apgar."

Dr. Apgar, who never made any money from the test, moved on to become a senior medical official at the March of Dimes in 1959, devoting the rest of her life to preventing birth defects and other conditions that caused newborns to have low Apgar scores. She was among the first to recognize and warn pregnant women about the dangers that infections, viruses, RH incompatibility and certain medications could pose to unborn babies....

Dr. Apgar took up flying in her 50s, and also played -- and made -- stringed instruments. One night, she and a colleague famously snuck into Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and stole a maple shelf from a phone booth that she thought would make a splendid violin. She died in 1974, having never married. "I never found a man who could cook," she often said....

These days, there are many high-tech ways to evaluate newborns, and some doctors say they would assign more importance to heart rate than the other conditions if the score were being designed today. But much of its genius was its simplicity...And despite other innovations, The New England Journal of Medicine concluded in 2001 that the Apgar score "remains as relevant for the prediction of neonatal survival today as it was almost 50 years ago."