Five Simple Signs

In 1952, at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar noticed something troubling: doctors had no standard method to evaluate a newborn's condition in those critical first minutes of life. Babies were whisked aside while attention stayed on the mother, and too often, subtle signs of distress went unrecognized. So Apgar devised a deceptively simple solution — five observable criteria, each scored from zero to two: heart rate, breathing effort, muscle tone, reflex response, and skin color.…