Apgar & White

Here’s another batch of stamps of famous Americans. Some are found on other pages. I’ve picked to research and write.

Virginia Apgar was a physician from the Twentieth Century, specializing in obstetrics and related fields. Because of so many infants dying in the first twenty-four hours from birth, in 1952 she developed a check list for examining infants immediately after they’re born to determine their health: breathing, heart rate, motion, muscles, reflexes, skin color. This Apgar scoring system is performed by doctors and nurses in the first minute a child is born. If an infant doesn’t score well, treatments are started based on the assessment, and the Apgar scoring is done every five minutes to monitor the health of the baby until they’re scoring well. Her work has saved an uncountable number of lives.

Besides being a doctor, Apgar loved to play the violin and she learned to make wooden string instruments. She made and played her own violin. She also liked fly fishing and stamp collecting. What a cool lady.

Paul Dudley White was also a physician, but specialized in cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital. One of the founders of the American Heart Association, he was a big proponent of preventive cardiology. When President Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack, White became the President’s physician. His recommendations were made public, encouraging people to ride bicycles, improve their diets and to keep their weight down. Ironically, he died of a stroke in 1973 – but he was eighty-seven years old, which was a long life at that time.

Note

It’s been a long struggle to find these stamps. This series has so many denominations and deviations. I’ve been looking for them over the past two years and buying them from maybe two dozen dealers. And yet I have a few more that I’ve been unable to find. I’m confident, though, that one day I’ll have them all.

I’m trying to wait until these pages are full and I’ve written text for all of these pages, before adding the pages I’m missing from my U.S. collection, from 1996 to 2024 – about thirty years of stamps. I have many of them in stockbooks and can get many that I’m missing, but it’ll be another batch of stamps in which I’m missing one or two on each definitive page like this one. Plus, plenty of pages of descriptions to write when I should be working on my latest novel.

Contains 25 spots: own 22 – 22 unused, 0 used.
Album or Web Page Last changed Jul 22, 2025

Stamp Details

The table below lists information about the stamps shown on this page of Lighthouse’s stamp album. For more details about a particular stamp, click on its description. That will take you to the related web page of Colnect.

spot

own

catalog

subject

description

comment

Famous Americans

1.1	✓	2933	Milton Hershey	32c (sep 1995) definitive, brown
1.2	✓	2934	Cal Farley	32c (apr 1996) definitive, green
1.3	✓	2938	Ruth Benedict	46c (oct 1995) definitive, carmine
1.4	✓	2940	Alice Hamilton	55c (jul 1995) definitive, green
1.5		2937	Alice Paul	78c (aug 1995) definitive, bright violet
2.1	✓	2169a	Mary Lyon	2c (feb 1987) definitive, bright blue
2.2	✓	2170a	Dr. Paul Dudley White	3c (sep 1986) definitive, bright blue
2.3	✓	2171a	Father Edward Flanagan	4c (jul 1986) definitive, greyish violet
2.4	✓	2171b	Father Edward Flanagan	4c (jul 1986) definitive, greyish blue
2.5	✓	2173a	Luis Munoz Marin	5c (feb 1990) definitive, carmine
3.1	✓	2175a	Red Cloud	10c (jan 1990) definitive, lake
3.2	✓	2175e	Red Cloud	10c (jan 1990) definitive, lake
3.3		2175c	Red Cloud	10c (jan 1991) definitive, carmine
3.4	✓	2177a	Buffalo Bill Cody	15c (jan 1990) definitive, claret
3.5	✓	2177b	Buffalo Bill Cody	15c (jan 1990) definitive, claret
4.1		2179a	Virginia Apgar	20c (oct 1994) definitive, orange brown
4.2	✓	2181a	Mary Stevenson Cassatt	23c (jan 1990) definitive, purple
4.3	✓	2181b	Mary Stevenson Cassatt	23c (jan 1991) definitive, purple
4.4	✓	2187a	Claire Chennault	40c (jan 1991) definitive, dark blue
4.5	✓	2188a	Dr. Harvey Cushing	45c (jun 1988) definitive, blue
5.1	✓	2943a	Alice Paul	78c (aug 1995) definitive, dull violet
5.2	✓	2943b	Alice Paul	78c (aug 1995) definitive, pale violet
5.3	✓	2194b	Johns Hopkins	$1 (jan 1990) definitive, black blue
5.4	✓	2194d	Johns Hopkins	$1 (jan 1992) definitive, black blue
5.5	✓	2196b	Francis Bret Harte	5$ (aug 1987) definitive, copper red

Footnotes

Spot refers to the postion of the stamp on the album page (e.g., 3.2 indicates row 3, position 2).
Amt. is an abbreviation for the face amount of the stamp.
Own indicates the stamp status: ✓ for unused; ✗ for used or canceled; ⭑ signifies I ordered one; ; ✨ indicates it was bought recently; ✠ means an auction bid is pending; and ◎ is used, and it costs too much for unused.
To search by catalog number, go to the search box and enter it in the catalog number box. However, it’s a bit broken; I need to fix it.