Born: 4 November 1942, United States
Died: 30 May 2019
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
Cataract surgery pioneer Patricia Bath was the first African-American to complete a residency in ophthalmology, after obtaining her MD at Howard University and her fellowship in ophthalmology at Columbia University.
At the time, she worked at Harlem Hospital and Columbia Eye Clinic and began to see the disparity between African-Americans and white patients when it came to vision problems. She believed the primary cause was the lack of access to ophthalmic care for the underprivileged, and began to promote the idea of outreach programs. Dr Bath conducted an influential epidemiologic study showing that, due to a lack of access to medical care, African-Americans had double the rate of blindness compared with whites. She urged Columbia professors to donate their time at the Harlem Hospital’s eye clinic to provide vision, cataract and glaucoma screening. By 1976, she co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, with the core principle that “eyesight is a basic human right.”
One of the key issues was that cataracts – an opaque covering that sometimes develops over aging eyes – robbed people of visual clarity but surgery was still not reliably safe and was more expensive than most people could afford. Before 1895, treatment involved hospitalization; the surgeon needed to make a large enough incision (later requiring stitches) to remove the cataract and replace it with a lens, making the process lengthy and painful. In 1981 Bath began exploring the possibilities of laser technologies, eventually creating what is now called the “Laserphaco Probe.” Using a laser to achieve pinpoint surgical accuracy, Bath added two tubes—one to irrigate the eye and another for suction. The surgeon could make a small incision with the laser, then the laser energy would vaporize the cataract. A new lens could be inserted almost immediately. Because the incision was smaller and the process simpler, the surgery can be done an outpatient basis and became more affordable as a result.
Bath continued to work on improving the Laserphaco Probe and holds three patents on it; she was also granted a patent for a device to remove cataracts using ultrasound in 2000. Much of the proceeds from her patents have gone to benefit the AIPB.
She was also the first female chair of an ophthalmology residency program in the United States (Drew-UCLA, 1983).