Patricia Bath

Patricia Bath was born in Harlem in 1942. Her father was the first Black motorman on the New York subway and her mother scrubbed floors to pay for her children\'s education. She was doing cancer research as a teenager and finished high school in two and a half years. She took her medical degree at Howard University in 1968.

As an intern she moved between the eye clinic at Harlem Hospital and the one at Columbia, and noticed that at Harlem half the patients were blind or nearly so, while at Columbia there were hardly any. She did the arithmetic and found that Black Americans were going blind at twice the rate of white Americans, largely from conditions nobody had treated. She persuaded her professors to operate on Harlem patients for free and proposed a new discipline, community ophthalmology, that sent eye care out to people who could not reach it.

She became the first Black woman to complete a residency in ophthalmology in 1973, and the first woman on the ophthalmology faculty at UCLA in 1975, where she was given an office in the basement next to the animal laboratory. She refused it.

Cataracts were then removed mechanically. In 1981 she conceived a probe that used laser light to vaporise the cloudy lens through a tiny incision, and after five years of work the patent was granted in 1988. She spent later years restoring sight to people who had been blind for decades, and died in 2019.