Patricia Era Bath (born November 4, 1942 in Harlem, New York and died May 30, 2019 in San Francisco) is an African American ophthalmologist and researcher. Among its innovations, there is the technique of laser cataract surgery used worldwide.
Patricia Era Bath was born on November 4, 1942 in Harlem, New York. Patricia is the daughter of Rupert Bath, a Trinidadian immigrant and the first African-American subway driver in New York City, and Gladys Rupert, a housekeeper. Young, she was confronted with racist and sexist discrimination and despite these humiliations, she was a brilliant student. It’s when she read the biography of Albert Schweitzer that Patricia Bath decided to study medicine.
While studying at the Charles Evans Hughes High School, Patricia Bath received a National Science Foundation Scholarship to participate in a research project at Yeshiva University under the guidance of Rabbi Moses D. Tendler, and at the Hospital Center of Harlem on the correlations between cancer, nutrition and stress. The research program manager, Dr. Robert O. Bernard, realizes the importance of her conclusions and published them in a scientific article, a publication that enabled her, in 1960, to receive the “Merit Award” awarded by the magazine Mademoiselle.
After high school, she joined the Hunter College in New York, where she graduated in 1964 with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry and she later entered Howard University in Washington to pursue her doctorate training. She graduated as a doctor (M.D) in 1968.
From 1969 to 1970, she obtained a degree in ophthalmologic surgery at Columbia University in New York. Patricia Bath is the first African American to earn a degree in surgery from the Jules Stein Eye Institute at Columbia University.
As a practitioner at the Harlem Ophthalmology Clinic, she noticed that many patients had glaucoma blindness, while few patients at the ophthalmic clinic at the Columbia Medical Center were suffering from glaucoma. After further research, she concluded in a report that African Americans were twice as likely to suffer from blindness as the general population. In her conclusions, Patricia Bath estimates that the main explanation for this disparity was the lack of access to eye care for Blacks and other socially disadvantaged people. As a result, with Dr. Aaron Ifekwunigwe (pediatrician) and Dr. Alfred Cannon (psychiatrist), she co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness. An institute that promotes, among other things, the concept of community ophthalmology, which functions as a outreach program, sending hospital staff to provide vision screening for cataracts and glaucoma. This institute has helped to save the vision of the elderly and provide glasses for school children.
From 1974 to 1987 Patricia taught ophthalmology at the California University of Los Angeles.
In 1983, she became a UCLA Chair Professor and Head of the Charles R. Drew Department of Medicine and Science at the University of Medicine and Science Charles R. Drew.
In 1986, after long years of research, Patricia Bath filed her patent for the Laser Laserphaco Probe used to cure cataract . She is thus the first African-American woman to obtain a patent for an invention in the medical field and she will file four other patents to improve the process.
Patricia died of cancer on May 30, 2019 at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco.
Her funeral was held at the Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles.
