A career full of firsts, Dr. Patricia Bath was the first black female physician to receive a medical patent, the first female faculty member at UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute, the first woman to become the chair of the ophthalmology residency training program at Drew/UCLA, and even created the field of community ophthalmology, which combines community medicine, public health, and clinical ophthalmology.
She believed eyesight was a basic human right, and co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness in 1976. This was all prior to her revolutionary invention, which she developed in 1981. Although Dr. Bath retired in 1993, she continued to do advocacy work for the institute, along with other causes in the medical field. She was the first of two black women inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022, three years after she passed away due to cancer-related complications. Though Dr. Bath is no longer with us, her legacy continues to live on, forever touching the lives of those who thought they may never see again.
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