Virginia Wouldn’t Slow Down

Title: Virginia Wouldn’t Slow Down
Author: Carrie A. Pearson
Major Themes: Doctors, Medicine, Babies
Synopsis: When Virginia Apgar, an early anesthesiologist, realized that babies were struggling after birth, she came up with a quick, easy method for evaluating them.

Have you ever wondered who came up with the Apgar score which is used to rate the health of newborns? I have seen it on my babies’ records many times, but I never stopped to wonder about it. That is, until I came across the very interesting picture book biography, Virginia Wouldn’t Slow Down.

Virginia Apgar was born in the early 1900s, at a time when girls were supposed to keep house and do quiet things. She refused to fit herself into that mold. She hated cooking and cleaning and playing music, and instead wanted to do active things. She managed to get into medical school, became a doctor, and then decided she wanted to become a surgeon. Soon, though, she changed her plan and instead became one of the first anesthesiologists in the United States.

As an anesthesiologist, Ginny began noticing how often babies were born with problems, but the doctors and nurses focused so much on caring for the mother that the baby was neglected. She used her skills to come up with a method of quickly evaluating the health of a newborn to determine whether it needed immediate care, or could wait a few minutes. The same five criteria she used to assess the health of a person she was anesthetizing worked to determine if a baby needed extra help quickly. Soon, her method was used around the world.

I found this book absolutely fascinating. I had no idea that, as recently as the 1950s, there was still no quick easy way to evaluate the needs of a newborn. I’m not sure how much my children understood of Virginia Wouldn’t Slow Down, when I read it to them yesterday, but I know they were all quite interested in the pictures and the design of this book. The pictures are somewhat comical, and the text is in bits and pieces throughout the pictures. My three-year-old, who loves babies, has spent quite a lot of time looking at the pictures and studying the babies in different places throughout the illustrations.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from NetGalley, and these are my honest thoughts about it.

No warnings!