Dr. Virginia Apgar was a pioneering female doctor who made significant contributions to anesthesiology and obstetric medicine. She developed the APGAR scoring system to evaluate the health of newborns and advocated for the prevention of birth defects before her death in 1974.
Dr. Virginia Apgar (1909-1974) makes medical history as one of the first female doctors and a person who made significant contributions to the fields of anesthesiology and obstetric medicine. Known as “Ginny” to her friends, she was so much more than a doctor. Her biographers label her as brilliant, pioneer, innovator and very courageous in resisting the prejudice against anesthesiologists, and more particularly against the male chauvinism that was quite evident in her early years as a doctor.
It might seem strange to say that Virginia Apgar was originally a musician. She was a brilliant cellist and violinist, who over the next few years built her own instruments to continue pursuing just one of her passions. Her prowess as a musician earned her a place in the orchestra of Mr. Holyoke College, where she earned a BA in Zoology.
Biographers suggest that Virginia Apgar was inspired to pursue medical school due to her family history. When she was a child, one of her brothers died of tuberculosis and another suffered from a chronic disease. Whatever her inspiration, Apgar pursued her goal of becoming a doctor with great focus, determination and focus. She enrolled in Columbia University medical school just before the Great Depression. Financial hardship followed her as she worked her way through school, but ultimately did not have a dilatory effect on her success in medical school. She graduated in 1933 with grades ranking fourth among that year’s doctoral graduates.
His hope was to major in surgery and he took a position as an intern at Columbia University. Her supervisor, Dr. Alan Whipple, urged her to study anesthesiology instead. The field was still extraordinarily rough. Apgar also had a hard time finding a place to train as an anesthesiologist.
As we know today, anesthesiology is an extremely important factor in surgery and you want your anesthetist to be equally if not more capable than your surgeon. When Virginia Apgar began practicing as an anesthetist, the specialty had a very low reputation and was not considered on par with other specialties. She was underpaid and having difficulty finding someone to work for her when she took a position at Columbia University hospital in 1938. Within ten years, her opinion on this field would undergo a significant transformation. Apgar not only had people willing to work for her, but she received a professorship appointment at Columbia, the first female doctor to receive one.
Apgar’s interest in anesthesiology soon became more focused on obstetrics. In the 1940s and 1950s it was customary to anesthetize women who were giving birth. Virginia Apgar noted that infants were often affected by medications given to mothers, and she sought a method for evaluating infants soon after birth to determine if medical care was needed. This became the APGAR scoring system, which is still in use. APGAR scores examine a baby’s activity, pulse, appearance, reflex response, and respiration to determine the health of the newborn.
His studies in this area would change the field of obstetrics, and doctors eventually came to understand that general anesthesia and even small amounts of painkillers could have significant effects on newborns. This has led to more modern trends of delivering infants with less pain mediation and also with modified methods for drug delivery that have less effect on a newborn.
Virginia Apgar would not have been a practicing doctor when these changes occurred. In 1959, she earned a master’s degree in public health and decided to focus her career on the prevention of birth defects. Her last few years were spent tirelessly advocating for more funding and research into cerebral palsy prevention at the organization now better known as the March of Dimes.
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