Changing the Equation by Tonya Bolden

Author:Tonya Bolden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2020-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

The fact that the summer institute said yes to Patricia was major, too. In August 1959 the black-owned newspaper New York Age reported that out of the 160 high school juniors and seniors who applied to the program, sixteen-year-old Patricia was one of only 28 accepted. “A surprising element in this young lady’s background,” remarked the Age, “is the fact there is no scientific history in her family. Her interest in the field came about as a result of a very healthy ‘curiosity’ which took her into comprehensive reading on various scientific subjects. As Miss Bath herself explains it, ‘I’m just searching for truth.’”

That curiosity, that search for truth, led Mademoiselle magazine to award Patricia a 1960 Merit Award, applauding her as one of the year’s ten most outstanding young American women. (Another was black track-and-field star Wilma Rudolph, who won three gold medals at the 1960 Olympics in Rome.)

Next steps for Patricia?

* Bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Hunter College (1964).

* MD from Howard University College of Medicine (with honors in 1968).

* Internship at Harlem Hospital (1968–1969).

* Residency in ophthalmology at New York University, completed in 1973—a first for a black person.

* Fellowship at Columbia University to do more study and training in corneal (specifically, cornea transplant) and keratoprosthesis (artificial cornea implant) surgery. By then, having discovered that in her New York City world black people had a higher rate of blindness and visual impairment than white people, she had spearheaded a now common discipline: community ophthalmology, wherein volunteer eye-care workers visit institutions, from day care centers to senior citizens’ homes, to see if people need glasses and to screen for eye diseases.

After Columbia, Dr. Bath was soon off to LA to work as an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and of surgery at nearby Charles R. Drew University (named after the black physician, surgeon, and medical researcher regarded as the “father” of the blood bank). In 1975 Dr. Bath became the first female faculty member at UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute, and in 1983 became the first woman in the world to head an ophthalmology residency training program, that of Drew/UCLA. By then, she had cofounded (in 1976) the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness (AiPb), a not-for-profit organization predicated on the belief that “eyesight is a basic human right.”

When it comes to all her firsts, Patricia Bath has not been prone to ego-tripping. “I wasn’t seeking to be first. I was just doing my thing, and I wanted to serve humanity along the way—to give the gift of sight.”

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