How important is Dr. Virginia Apgar to the modern practice of obstetrics? Here is the way the National Library of Medicine's website puts it: "[E]very baby born in a modern hospital anywhere in the ...

In the medical world, many say that a newborn baby is first seen through the eyes of Dr. Virginia Apgar. In the early 1950s, Apgar came up with a test that could give information to a physician about ...

In the 1930s and 1940s, Dr. Virginia Apgar noticed something odd. Despite the US infant mortality rate decreasing overall, a high number of infants were still dying within 24 hours of birth. Part of ...

In his masterful book Better, surgeon Atul Gawande writes that in the 1950s, newborn babies in the United States faced great danger: "One in thirty still died at birth—odds that were scarcely better ...