40 Fun Facts About Patricia Bath

Patricia Bath turned down the first office UCLA offered her because it was in the basement next to what?

The lab animals were to be her neighbours, so Bath told the department the space was inappropriate and won a proper office. She had just become its first woman faculty member.

Which invention earned Patricia Bath a patent in 1988, making her the first Black woman doctor to hold a medical one?

Laserphaco Probe takes the first half of its name from laser photoablative cataract surgery. Bath had the idea in 1981, but it took her nearly five years of research and testing to make the device work.

Which gift from her mother, a domestic worker, helped spark young Patricia Bath's lifelong love of science?

A chemistry set from Gladys Bath fed her daughter's curiosity, and Bath later took her first degree in the same subject. Her mother also saved her wages to pay for the children's schooling.

Whose assassination spurred medical student Patricia Bath to organise free healthcare at a Washington protest camp?

Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in April 1968, during Bath's final year of medical school. That summer she led fellow students staffing a clinic for protesters camped on the National Mall.

Patricia Bath's best-known invention removes cataracts, which are a clouding of which part of the eye?

Lens removal is only half the job. Once the laser has dissolved the cloudy tissue, the device rinses the eye and lets the surgeon slip in a clear artificial replacement.

At sixteen, Patricia Bath joined a summer research program and made conference-worthy findings on which disease?

Cancer cell growth was her subject: the teenager derived an equation to predict it, and a mentor built her findings into the paper he presented in Washington in 1960.

Patricia Bath concluded that the higher rate of blindness among Black Americans was mainly due to what?

Lack of access to care was her verdict after she saw that half the patients at one eye clinic were blind or visually impaired, while a university clinic nearby had very few.

Which New York neighbourhood was Patricia Bath's birthplace and home to the hospital where she first interned?

Harlem's hospital had no eye specialists of its own when Bath interned there, so she persuaded her professors to operate on blind patients for free.

Patricia Bath and engineer Marian Croak became the first Black women inducted into which American institution in 2022?

National Inventors Hall of Fame induction came three years after Bath's death. Croak, honoured alongside her, has filed more than 200 patents, many of them for internet phone calls.

Patricia Bath's institute gives malnourished children supplements of which nutrient, essential for healthy vision?

Vitamin A supplements sit beside the institute's other projects for children: anti-infection eye drops for newborns and vaccination against diseases that can blind.

Patricia Bath's institute vaccinates children against diseases that can blind, including which contagious virus?

Measles counts blindness among its complications, so the institute treats the vaccine as a way of protecting sight. Its mission is to protect, preserve and restore vision.

Patricia Bath graduated with honours in 1968 from the medical school of which historically Black university?

Howard University later named her a Pioneer in Academic Medicine, and she returned as a professor of ophthalmology after retiring from UCLA.

Patricia Bath restored sight to long-blind patients with keratoprosthesis, an artificial version of which eye part?

Cornea replacement gave Bath what she called her personal best moment: on a mission to North Africa, a woman who had been blind for thirty years could see again.

Patricia Bath's father Rupert, a well-travelled merchant seaman, emigrated to New York from which Caribbean island?

Trinidad was the island Rupert Bath left for New York. Well travelled himself, he encouraged his daughter to explore other cultures.

Rupert Bath, father of eye surgeon Patricia Bath, was the first Black man to hold which New York City job?

Subway motorman was one of several lives for Rupert Bath, who also wrote a newspaper column. His daughter went on to collect a string of firsts of her own.

Which medical missionary, famous for his hospital in Africa, inspired young Patricia Bath to become a doctor?

Albert Schweitzer, winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, treated leprosy patients at his jungle hospital. Reading about him in the newspapers put Bath on the path to medicine.

Patricia Bath earned her bachelor's degree in 1964 from which Manhattan college, part of the city's public university?

Hunter College began in 1870 as a women's college and admitted its first male freshmen only in 1946, when Bath was a small child.

Patricia Bath broke a colour barrier in 1970 as the first African American ophthalmology resident at which university?

NYU trained her from 1970 to 1973, and the residency overlapped with new motherhood: her daughter was born in 1972.

The California medical university where Patricia Bath co-founded an eye residency is named for which blood-bank pioneer?

Charles R. Drew organised the large-scale blood banks that saved Allied lives in the Second World War, and he protested against the segregation of donated blood by race.

Patricia Bath's research found blindness from which eye disease was far more common among Black Americans?

Glaucoma was one of the conditions Bath's trained volunteers screened for when they visited senior centres, catching problems that would otherwise have gone undiagnosed.

What name did Patricia Bath give the medical discipline she proposed in 1976 to bring eye care to underserved people?

Community ophthalmology blends public health with clinical eye care. Its volunteers also spot children who need glasses, giving them a better chance of success at school.

Patricia Bath completed her laser cataract device in 1986 after research at a laser centre in which European city?

Berlin, then a divided city, gave Bath the laboratory time she could not get at home, where her requests for research grants had been turned down.

Besides lasers, Patricia Bath patented a method in 2000 for breaking up cataracts with pulses of what?

Ultrasound earned Bath her fourth US patent, and her fifth, in 2003, combined it with a laser in a single cataract-removing method.

After retiring from UCLA, Patricia Bath championed which way of delivering medical services to remote areas?

Telemedicine became her cause in retirement. She held posts in it at two universities and pushed for virtual 3D training that gave trainee eye surgeons more realistic practice.

Weeks before her death in 2019, Patricia Bath testified about the gender gap in invention before which body?

The U.S. Senate hearing was titled Trailblazers and Lost Einsteins, and Bath, by then holder of five patents, spoke about how few women ever receive one.

Medical student Patricia Bath spent the summer of 1967 researching in Belgrade, then the capital of which country?

Yugoslavia was her first taste of medicine abroad: a government fellowship sent her there to study paediatric surgery, decades before her own overseas missions.

Patricia Bath led medical students giving free care at Resurrection City, the Washington camp of which protest movement?

Poor People's Campaign marchers lived for six weeks in a shantytown they built in the capital, demanding economic justice for poor Americans of every background.

Which federal agency funded the summer program that launched sixteen-year-old Patricia Bath's research career?

National Science Foundation backing put the teenager in a university laboratory, and decades later the agency was among the bodies that honoured her achievements.

When Patricia Bath retired from UCLA Medical Center in 1993, she became the first woman elected to what?

Its honorary staff had never included a woman until Bath, who years earlier had been the first woman on the faculty of the university's eye institute.

Which type of ultraviolet laser, later used in LASIK, powered Patricia Bath's first cataract-removal experiments?

Excimer lasers break tissue apart molecule by molecule rather than burning it, leaving the rest almost unheated. Bath first tried one on donated eyes from an eye bank.

Which fashion magazine gave teenage Patricia Bath a Merit Award in 1960 for her summer laboratory research?

Mademoiselle, a fashion magazine also known for publishing Truman Capote and Sylvia Plath, singled out the New York schoolgirl for the findings from her summer project.

Patricia Bath was the first woman ophthalmologist on the faculty of which UCLA centre, named for a co-founder of MCA?

Jules Stein Eye Institute takes its name from an eye doctor who left medicine to book bands and went on to build a Hollywood talent agency.

Which film festival honoured eye surgeon Patricia Bath with one of its Disruptive Innovation Awards in 2012?

Tribeca honoured her as a disruptor nearly a quarter of a century after the patent that earned the label, for a laser method that changed how cataracts are removed.

Which historically Black sorority, founded in 1908, honoured Patricia Bath with its Presidential Award in 2014?

Alpha Kappa Alpha was born on the very campus where Bath later earned her medical degree, and its award recognised her work in the health and medical sciences.

Beyond the United States, Patricia Bath patented her laser cataract device in Canada, Europe and which Asian country?

Japan was among the places that granted her patents, and by 2000 her minimally invasive device was in use in both Europe and Asia.

Gladys Bath, mother of Patricia Bath, was descended from enslaved Africans and which Native American people?

Cherokee and African ancestry came down through Gladys Bath, who cleaned houses and put her wages aside so that her children could stay in school.

Eraka Bath, daughter of eye surgeon Patricia Bath, became a doctor on the UCLA faculty in which specialty?

Psychiatry is the field of Dr. Eraka Bath, who was a toddler when her mother moved the two of them across the country to begin teaching in California.

Patricia Bath worked in 1986 with laser pioneer Danièle Aron-Rosa at the Rothschild eye institute in which city?

Paris was where Aron-Rosa had developed a pulsed YAG laser for eye surgery in the 1970s, which made her laboratory a natural first stop on Bath's European sabbatical.

Which New York university hosted the summer research program where teenage Patricia Bath first worked in a laboratory?

Yeshiva University ran the program for high-school students, and one of Bath's mentors there thought enough of her results to build them into his own conference paper.

Patricia Bath's institute gave computers to the Mwereni School for the Blind in which East African country?

Tanzania was her destination in 2005 because cataracts were the main cause of childhood blindness there, and her institute followed up with digital tools for visually impaired pupils.