Dr. Patricia Bath: Free Healthcare for All

Dr. Patricia Era Bath November 4, 1942 – May 30, 2019 (aged 76) Photo source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Bath

Dr. Patricia Era Bath is famously known for She was the inventor of laser cataract surgery. This post is designed to not only acknowledge her medical contributions, but her organizing work and community contributions as well.

Bath is from Harlem, New York. Her parentage includes a father who was an immigrant from Trinidad and mother who was of African and Indigenous descent.

Bath’s passion for science and medicine began at an early age. By the time she was in high school, she was alredy acknowledged by Madomioselle magazine highlight her findings regarding as cancer. She had an early understanding of how cancer behaves and tumors as symptoms

Bath is notable, not only because of scienfic brilliance, but also she was an activist that used her expertise to provide service to poor and black communities.

Bath continued her education at Howard University in Washington, D.C. during the 1960s, the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King organized the Poor People’s Campaign, class organizing, in an effort to obtain economic equity for the working class. This campaign inspired Bath to lead students in providing healthcare services to the Poor People’s campaign.

Her passion to help communities disproprotationately impacted by the inaccessibility of health care continued throughout her life. Upon returning to Harlem, she observed that there were more people in need of care for vision impairment than at Columbia University. This provoked her to collect data that she used to influence Columbia professors to perform free operations to those in need of care for their eyesight.

She eventually went on to invent the process for removing cataracts and was granted the patent in 1988.

Receipts aka Sources