On September 24, 1919, Virginia Apgar was born in Westfield, New Jersey. She graduated from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1933 as one of nine women in a class of ninety, finished first in the surgery residency rankings, and was then told by the chief of surgery that women could not succeed in surgical careers and should pursue anesthesiology instead.

She became an anesthesiologist. She developed the Apgar score.

The Apgar score — a rapid assessment system for evaluating newborns' health within the first minutes of life using heart rate, respiration, muscle tone, reflex response, and color — was published in 1953 and is now administered to every infant born in a hospital worldwide. Before the Apgar score, there was no systematic method for identifying which newborns needed immediate medical intervention. Babies who would have survived with intervention were not identified in time.

Apgar spent the second half of her career at the March of Dimes, where she built the National Foundation for research on birth defects. She lobbied Congress, trained medical professionals, and wrote a book for parents on birth defects that sold widely.

She earned a master's degree in public health from Johns Hopkins in 1959, at age forty. She never married. She played the viola, built instruments, and flew airplanes.

The anesthesiologist who designed the most widely used neonatal assessment tool in medical history is sometimes described in surveys of medical history under "anesthesiology."