Retired University of California, Los Angeles, ophthalmologist Patricia Bath, an inventor whose research on lasers advanced cataract surgery and a physician who strove to prevent blindness, died on May 30. She was 76.
Bath became the first African American surgeon at the UCLA medical center and co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness.
“I had a few obstacles but I had to shake it off,” Bath told ABC News last year. “Hater-ation, segregation, racism, that’s the noise you have to ignore that and keep your eyes focused on the prize, it’s just like Dr. Martin Luther King said, so that’s what I did.”
According to the Associated Press, Bath was born in Harlem. Her father worked for the New York City subway system, and her mother was a domestic worker. She graduated from Howard University’s medical school and then worked as an intern at Harlem Hospital and Columbia ...
