Dr. Patricia E. Bath-Black History Medical Pioneer

Dr. Patricia E. Bath is a Black Medical Pioneer. She was an opthamologist, laser scientist, and inventor. She spent much of her time researching prevention, treatment, and cures for blindness. She was the inventor of the device and technique used for cataract surgery known as the Laserphaco. When she filed for and received a medical patent for the Laserphaco, she became the first Black woman in America to do so.

Dr. Bath was born in Harlem, NY in 1942. Patricia’s interest in science was piqued at an early age when her mother purchased a Chemistry set for her.

After excelling in her high school and college studies, Patricia went on to receive her medical degree from Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C. Afterward, she interned at Harlem Hospital and completed a fellowship in ophthalmology at Columbia University from 1969 to 1970. Following her internship, Dr. Bath finished her training at New York University, where she was the first African American resident in ophthalmology.

As an intern working between Harlem Hospital and Columbia University, Dr. Bath quickly noticed that at the eye clinic in Harlem half the patients were blind or visually impaired. At the eye clinic at Columbia, by contrast, there were very few blind patients. This led her to conduct a study, which found that blindness among blacks was double that among whites. She concluded that the high prevalence of blindness among blacks was due to lack of access of eye care. Dr. Bath proposed a new discipline, known as community ophthalmology, which is now being used worldwide. Community ophthalmology offers primary eye care to underserved populations. This outreach has saved the sight of thousands whose problems would otherwise have gone undiagnosed and untreated.

In 1975 Dr. Bath became the first woman faculty member in the Department of Ophthalmology at UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute. By 1983 she was chair of the ophthalmology residency training program at Drew-UCLA, the first woman in the US to hold such a position.

Dr. Bath developed the laserphaco probe, a medical device that improves on the use of lasers to remove cataracts in 1986, and became the first Black woman to receive a patent for a medical purpose. She went on to attain 4 more patents before her passing in 2019. In 2021 it was announced that Dr. Bath would be one of the first two black women to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Salute Dr. Bath!