Patricia Bath

Patricia Era Bath was born in Harlem on the fourth of November 1942, the daughter of a Trinidadian-immigrant motorman on the New York City subway and a domestic worker. She graduated from Charles Evans Hughes High School in two and a half years rather than four. She took her undergraduate degree at Hunter College (1964) and her MD at Howard University College of Medicine (1968).

She completed her ophthalmology residency at New York University and her cornea-transplant fellowship at Columbia between 1970 and 1973 — the first African American resident in ophthalmology in either institution's history. She joined the UCLA Jules Stein Eye Institute faculty in 1974 as the first African American woman surgeon on staff; she co-founded its Ophthalmology Training Program in 1975.

Her sustained clinical research established that African Americans suffered from blindness at twice the rate of white Americans and from glaucoma at six to eight times the rate. She founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness in 1976 to address those disparities through international community ophthalmology — a discipline she effectively founded.

In 1986 she completed the laboratory work that produced the Laserphaco Probe — a fiber-optic surgical device that used laser energy to disintegrate cataracts and then vacuum out the fragmented tissue, dramatically reducing the surgical complexity of cataract removal. She received U.S. Patent No. 4,744,360 on the seventeenth of May 1988 — becoming the first African American woman physician to receive a U.S. medical patent. She received four further patents on improvements to the device. The Laserphaco technique is now the standard procedure for cataract surgery worldwide.

She died in San Francisco on the thirtieth of May 2019, age seventy-six.

She is honored here as the ophthalmologist whose patented laser restored sight to millions.