Patricia Bath

Early life

Patricia Bath was born on 4 November 1942 in Harlem, New York City, to Rupert and Gladys Bath. According to the National Women's History Museum, her father, an immigrant from Trinidad, was the first Black motorman on the New York City subway, and her mother worked as a cleaner to help pay for her education.

Bath raced through school. She finished Charles Evans Hughes High School in two and a half years, took part in a National Science Foundation research program, and in 1960 won a Mademoiselle magazine merit award for cancer research. She earned a bachelor's degree from Hunter College in 1964 and her medical degree from Howard University College of Medicine in 1968.

Community ophthalmology

As an intern at Harlem Hospital and then a fellow in ophthalmology at Columbia University, Bath noticed how unequal eye care was. She documented that blindness among Black Americans was nearly twice the rate among white Americans, mostly because of poor access to care. Her response was a new discipline she named community ophthalmology, aimed at bringing eye care to communities that lacked it. She helped bring eye surgery to Harlem Hospital's eye clinic, then completed her residency at New York University, where sources describe her as a first among Black residents.

In 1974 she moved to Los Angeles to join the faculty of UCLA and Charles R. Drew University. In 1975 she became the first woman on the faculty of UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute. With colleagues she co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, whose founding principle was that eyesight is a basic human right. In 1983 she became the first woman in the United States to chair an ophthalmology residency program.

The Laserphaco Probe

Bath conceived the Laserphaco Probe in 1981. It uses laser energy delivered through a fiber-optic tip to break up a cataract through a very small incision, and an ultrasonic tip and suction remove the fragments. She received U.S. Patent No. 4,744,360 in 1988. The USPTO and the National Women's History Museum both describe her as the first Black woman physician to receive a U.S. patent for a medical device. Later refinements brought further U.S. and international patents. By 2000 the method was in use in several countries.

Later life and legacy

Bath retired from UCLA in 1993 and was then the first woman elected to the honorary medical staff of the UCLA Medical Center. She also served as a medical consultant to the World Health Organization. In April 2019 she testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on intellectual property. She died of complications of cancer on 30 May 2019, aged 76. She was inducted posthumously into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022.