Have you seen today's Google Doodle? Today, June 7^th, is the birthday of legendary physician, Virginia Apgar, the creator of the Apgar score. The Apgar score is used in delivery rooms around the world to assess newborn well-being. If you work in maternal-child health, you probably are very familiar with this screening test which looks at color, heart rate, reflexes, muscle tone, and respirations at 1-minute and 5-minutes after birth. It’s used to assess the transition of the newborn to extrauterine life.

Today would have been Dr. Virginia Apgar’s 109th birthday. Dr. Apgar was an obstetric anesthesiologist at the Sloan Hospital for Women, where, in 1952, she developed this scoring system for measuring the physical condition of newborn infants that bears her name. Here is a short lecture by Dr. Apgar which Audio Digest recorded in 1966, where she describes how that scoring system came to be. We hope you enjoy this lecture.