Patricia Bath

This doctor invented a laser that can give sight back to the blind.

At 16, Patricia Bath was already doing cancer research as a National Science Foundation scholar.

Her findings on the relationship between stress, nutrition, and cancer were so compelling they were featured on the front page of the New York Times.

Patricia’s first year of med school overlapped with the Civil Rights Act.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, she led medical students at Howard to volunteer in Resurrection City, providing care to participants in the Poor People’s Campaign.

Then, during her internship at Harlem Hospital, she noticed patients were going blind at far higher rates than anywhere else.

She compared Harlem’s data with Columbia University’s Eye Clinic just uptown.

She found that Black patients were twice as likely to be blind.

And eight times more likely to go blind from glaucoma.

In 1976, she coined the term “community ophthalmology.”

It was a new field that combined public health, clinical medicine, and education and specifically focused on preventing blindness in underserved communities.

She launched screening programs, trained volunteers, and used mobile eye units to reach populations who had never seen an eye doctor.

In 1970, Bath became the first Black ophthalmology resident at NYU.

And in 1977, she co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, alongside a Nigerian pediatrician and an American psychiatrist.

They delivered free eye drops, vitamin A supplements, and measles vaccines to children in underserved communities.

She also founded UCLA’s Ophthalmic Assistant Training Program, which trained technicians to screen and educate patients.

By 1983, she became the first woman in the U.S. to chair an ophthalmology residency program, at Drew-UCLA.

But there was one thing she still wanted to do: innovate.

Denied funding in the U.S., she took a sabbatical and brought her ideas to Europe, working with leading laser scientists in Paris, Berlin, and London.

There, she created the Laserphaco Probe.

A device that used lasers to painlessly and precisely remove cataracts, restore vision, and allow for the easy insertion of a replacement lens.

She completed the prototype in 1986.

And in 1988, secured a U.S. patent, becoming the first African-American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical device.

Her invention has restored vision for millions, including patients who had been blind for over 30 years.

Bath retired from UCLA in 1993 and passed away in 2019.

Her honors are too many to list, but here are a few:
- National Inventors Hall of Fame
- National Women’s Hall of Fame
- American Medical Women’s Association Hall of Fame
- Presidential recognition by Barack Obama, who appointed her to a national commission on digital accessibility for blind children