Patricia Bath

Patricia Era Bath was born on November 4, 1942 at Harlem Hospital. Her father, Rupert Bath, had immigrated from Trinidad and worked the Atlantic on merchant-marine ships. He was one of the first Black motormen on the New York City subway system. Her mother, Gladys, had been born in North Carolina and worked in domestic service, saving quietly and systematically for her children's educations. "She bought me my chemistry set," Bath later recalled. "She bought me my microscope. She did it on her cleaning wages."

She read through the Harlem Public Library's science shelf by twelve. At sixteen she applied to a summer cancer-research program sponsored by the National Science Foundation at Yeshiva University and Harlem Hospital. She was accepted. The program director, Robert Bernard, assigned her a study of cell-growth mathematics. Her analysis was published in his paper at the Fifth International Congress on Nutrition in 1960. She was still in high school.

Charles Evans Hughes High School let her graduate in two and a half years. She enrolled at Hunter College, earned a bachelor's in chemistry in 1964, and was admitted to Howard University College of Medicine. Howard in the 1960s was the country's leading Black medical school. She worked in the summer at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons under ophthalmologist Abraham Minkler, who opened a door in her thinking. She had gone to Howard intending to become a cardiologist. In his clinic she saw something else.

Minkler's patients came out of Harlem. They were going blind. Bath had grown up there. She began comparing what she saw in his Columbia waiting room against what she remembered from the Harlem Hospital emergency rooms where her father had taken her as a child. The numbers were not comparable. Black Americans in the United States went blind from glaucoma, cataracts, and diabetic retinopathy at rates several times those of white Americans, and by the time they reached an eye specialist the disease was already advanced. Most of it was preventable.

She earned her MD from Howard in 1968, interned at Harlem Hospital, and in 1970 was admitted to the ophthalmology residency at New York University. No Black woman had ever been admitted to one. She graduated the residency in 1973 as the first. By then she had begun to publish what she called community ophthalmology, the idea that eye care could not be restricted to a specialist's office but had to be delivered on bus routes, in public schools, in senior centers, and in the back rooms of barber shops. She pushed Columbia to authorize free eye-screening programs for Harlem schoolchildren. The hospital agreed. The screenings began in 1969 and continued for decades.

In 1974 she joined the UCLA Jules Stein Eye Institute faculty and moved to Los Angeles. She was the first Black woman appointed to the UCLA Medical Center surgical faculty. The department assigned her an office in a basement and labeled it "honorary faculty office." She refused to take it and for about five years was given only working space rather than a permanent office. She kept working. In 1975 she moved her clinical work between UCLA and the King-Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles, the teaching hospital associated with the Charles R. Drew Medical School, carrying free screenings out into the neighborhoods the university rarely served.

In 1976 she and Lois Young-Tafari co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness in Washington, D.C. Its mission statement, written by Bath, reads: "Eyesight is a basic human right." The institute trained local eye-care workers, organized screening drives, distributed eyeglasses, and financed cataract surgery for people who could not otherwise pay. It still operates.

Her research focused on cataract surgery. The standard technique of the 1970s broke up a hardened cataract with a mechanical grinding probe, a process that took twenty minutes or more and carried real risk to the remaining structures of the eye. Bath followed the work of the French ophthalmologist Danièle Aron-Rosa, one of the first to use a laser on ocular tissue, and began her own lab work on a laser approach. She traveled to the Laser Medical Center in West Berlin in 1981 to run experiments on donated cadaver eyes, because the laser equipment and animal-research approvals she needed were more readily available there. She published the results, refined the device, and filed for a U.S. patent in 1986.

On May 17, 1988, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent 4,744,360 for the Laserphaco Probe, "Apparatus for ablating and removing cataract lenses." The device used a pulsed laser to vaporize the cataract, an irrigation line to flush the fragments, and an aspiration line to clear the lens capsule, all through a 1-millimeter probe. The procedure time, in competent hands, fell below one minute. She was the first Black woman physician in the United States to receive a medical patent. She filed four more over the next two decades on successor versions of the device.

She did not stop at the laboratory. She flew to Nigeria, Pakistan, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Central America with surgical teams, running free cataract operations in communities where the patients had been blind for years. She called it her ministry. A woman in a remote village in northern Nigeria, blind for more than thirty years, regained sight under a probe Bath herself was holding. Bath said later that moment was the work.

UCLA did eventually give her an office above ground. She chaired the UCLA ophthalmology training program, the first woman to do so. She retired from surgical practice in 1993 after an illness but continued to lecture, publish, and advocate into her seventies. She remained close with her daughter, Eraka Bath, who became a child and adolescent psychiatrist at UCLA and who has continued her mother's work on health care disparity.

Patricia Bath died on May 30, 2019 in San Francisco, at the age of 76. The Laserphaco Probe and its successor versions have restored sight to hundreds of thousands of cataract patients. The American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness operates in the United States and abroad. The U.S. Postal Service issued a Patricia Bath Black Heritage stamp in 2021. In 2022 she was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, one of the few Black women ever named.