Day 19 - Dr. Patricia Bath - Super Hero of Sight!

Patricia E. Bath at her Los Angeles home office, 1994

Sometimes it is amazing to be the first. The Wright Brothers were the first to fly a plane. John Glenn was the first American in space. Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon.

They had to be the first because nobody had ever done those things before.

What if their whole lives had been about being the first of something?

Enter Dr. Patricia Bath - Super Hero




"Do not let your mind be imprisoned by majority thinking. Remember that the limits of science are not the limits of imagination." - Dr. Patricia Bath (source)

Patricia Bath was born in Harlem, NY in 1942. Her parents worked hard to provide for the family, but there was never much money.

They instilled in their daughter the importance of education. Her father had been a Merchant Marine, a writer who helped her appreciate travel and culture. Her mother worked as a domestic and she stressed how important it was to get an education. She also bought her daughter a chemistry set.

Patricia attended Charles Evans High School. (This school is no longer in operation.)

At sixteen, she won a National Science Foundation Scholarship. It allowed her to work at Yeshiva University and Harlem Hospital Center. She studied the effects of stress, and diet on cancer patients. The head of the program, Dr. Robert Bernard, was so impressed with her work that he included some of her research in his final paper.

source

Her work was so phenomenal that in 1960 she won a merit award form Madamoiselle Magazine.

She achieved her BA in chemistry from Hunter College in 1964 and graduated from the College of Medicine at Howard University in 1968.

She was an activist at Howard. It was the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and she was in the thick of it. She organized and led Howard University medical students in providing volunteer health care services to the Poor People's Campaign in Resurrection City in the summer of 1968.

After Howard, she returned to New York to do a residency at New York University. She was the first African American woman to ever complete a residency in Opthalmology.

Afterward, she did a fellowship at Columbia University in the ophthalmology department. She discovered that African Americans were twice as likely to go blind, and eight times as likely to suffer from glaucoma. Dr. Bath was frustrated that many of the conditions that lead to blindness could be prevented with basic treatments. To combat this problem, she designed a community system to bring basic medical care to underserved populations that could not easily afford to see a doctor.

The system she pioneered? Community Opthalmology. The model she created is now a worldwide system.

From this point on, Dr. Bath started down a path that meant that almost everything she did was harder because she was either the first woman, African American woman, or African American person to achieve it. She said of her life that her biggest obstacles were the racism and sexism she encountered at every turn. Luckily, this did not stop her.


 1975 - Dr. Bath was the first female faculty member in the Department of Opthalmology  at UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute

1976 - Dr. Bath Cofounded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness. It was founded on the belief that sight is a human right. Their goal was and is to work to preserve people's sight. Today, this is a huge international organization that works to bring ophthalmological care to people who might not be able to get it. They work everywhere from third world countries to poor neighborhoods right here in America. She also instituted something called telemedicine into the organization.

Dr. Bath spent the rest of her life fighting what she felt was unnecessary blindness.

- 1983 Bath helped create the Opthalmology Research Training Program at UCLA and Drew University. She also chaired the program, becoming the first woman in the nation to hold such a position.

source

In the 1980s Dr. Bath became interested in lasers. She had an idea that lasers could be used to help
people with cataracts. She ducked out of America for a few years and went to do research in Germany and France.

"In 1986, Bath did research in the laboratory of Danièle Aron-Rosa, a pioneer researcher in lasers and ophthalmology at Rothschild Eye Institute of Paris,^[19] and then at the Laser Medical Center in Berlin, where she was able to begin early studies in laser cataract surgery, including her first experiment with excimer laser photoablation using human eye bank eyes." source

The end result of her research?



- 1988 - Dr. Bath patented the Laserphalco Probe for cataract surgery.
- Dr. Bath is the first African American woman to receive a patent for a medical device.
She also holds patents for this device in Japan, Canada, and Europe.

One of Dr. Bath's most amazing moments was using the probe to remove cataracts from the eyes of a woman who hadn't been able to see for thirty years.

- 1993 Dr. Bath retires and became a Howard University Pioneer in Academic Medicine.

The Laserphalco Probe is used worldwide today. If you hear that someone is going in for cataract surgery...they are about to come face to face with Dr. Bath's brainchild.

She was the first in lots of things because she didn't let anyone stop her.

Dr. Bath was a superhero who fought for the right to see.

#celebrateblack history