Pioneering ophthalmologist Dr. Patricia Bath whose work led to the creation of laser pioneering died on May 30th at the age of 76.
The retired University of California, Los Angeles ophthalmologist became the first African-American surgeon at the UCLA medical center. She later co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness in an effort to help communities of color.
The cataract treatment inventor was also the first “African-American female doctor to receive a medical patent after she invented a more precise treatment of cataracts,” NBC News reported.
She died from complications of cancer at the University of California San Francisco medical center.
Born in Harlem, New York, to a mother who was a domestic worker and a father who worked on the city subway system. Early on Bath was fascinated by science, and as a teenager she won a National Science Foundation scholarship. She graduated from Howard University’s medical school and interned in New York.
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When Bath moved to California she became the first African-American surgeon at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center. She was also the first woman ophthalmologist on the faculty of UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute. Bath went on to co-found an ophthalmology residency program.
In1983, Bath was appointed Chair of the King-Drew-UCLA Ophthalmology Residency Program, this role made Bath the first woman in the United States to head such a residency program.
Throughout her career, she wanted to make a difference.
“She noticed a large discrepancy in the rates of blindness between the majority-black patients at Harlem and majority-white patients at Columbia. To quantify this, she conducted an epidemiological study that found the rate of blindness among the Black population was twice that of whites,” The Scientist reported.
Concerned by the epidemic levels of blindness from preventable causes among America’s under-served, often minority communities as well as in poor countries overseas, she co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, a nonprofit that operates under the motto that “eyesight is a basic human right.”
Bath admitted she had her societal challenges, but fought to overcome them.
“I had a few obstacles but I had to shake it off,” Bath told “Good Morning America” in 2018. “Hater-ation, segregation, racism, that’s the noise you have to ignore that and keep your eyes focused on the prize, it’s just like Dr. Martin Luther King said, so that’s what I did.”
In addition, Bath pioneered a new medical discipline — community ophthalmology — to deal with such preventable blindness through education, public health outreach, and local offering of medical services.
Bath earned four other US patents and three countries outside of the U.S. According to AP, she authored more than 100 publications.
