Search giant Google pays respect to American obstetrical anaesthetist Dr Virginia Apgar on her 109th birth anniversary with a colourful doodle. The woman who is known to be the inventor of Apgar Score, a method to summarise the birth of newborns, was born in 1909 and introduced obstetrical considerations to the established field of neonatology.
Youngest of the three children, Dr Virginia Apgar was raised in Westfield New Jersey in the United States. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College in 1929 and from the Colombia University College Of Physicians and Surgeons in 1933, she started doing what she loved the best and by 1937, she was the first woman to be a board-certified anesthesiologist.
In just a few years, Virginia achievement a lot. In 1949, she became the first professor of anesthesiology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. She was also the first female physician to get the rank of full professor at the college. Dr Apgar developed the famous score in 1952 to quantify the effect of obstetric anaesthesia on babies.
(Also read: Google celebrates Danish Biochemist SPL Sorensen for creating pH scale with a Doodle)
She was always interested in treating the newborns so when she finally presented the Apgar score system, she relied on five indicators- Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration. While a score above 7 is normal, anything between 4 to 6 is fairly low. Below 3 is considered critically low, and it means that the child requires medical attention.
She died on August 7, 1974, of cirrhosis of the liver at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. But her score system is still used to quickly assess the health of newborns.