Patricia Bath for kids: a true picture book

Patricia Bath: a timeline of true facts

1. 1950s When Patricia was a girl in Harlem, New York City, there were no women doctors she knew of, surgery was mostly a job for men, and Black students were kept out of many medical schools. source
2. 1942 Patricia Bath was born in Harlem in 1942; her mother bought her a first chemistry set when she was 12, and her father was the first Black man to work as a motorman on the New York City Subway. source
3. 1968 After medical school at Howard University, Patricia came home in 1968 to work as a young doctor at Harlem Hospital. source
4. 1968 At the Harlem eye clinic, about half the patients were blind or losing their sight, while at Columbia University's eye clinic, where she also worked, there were very few blind patients. source
5. 1969 Her study showed that blindness among Black people was double that among white people, and she found the reason: many could not get eye care. source
6. 1969 Harlem Hospital's eye clinic did no eye surgery, so Patricia persuaded her professors at Columbia to operate on blind patients there for free, and she helped as an assistant surgeon. source
7. 1970s A cataract is a cloudy area in the lens of the eye, the clear part that focuses light; it makes the world look blurry and faded, and surgery is the only way to get rid of it. source
8. 1976 In 1976 she started a new kind of eye care, community ophthalmology, in which trained volunteers visit senior centers and day care programs to test people's eyes, and she co-founded a group built on the idea that eyesight is a basic human right. source
9. 1975 At UCLA she became the first woman eye doctor on the faculty of the Jules Stein Eye Institute, but she was offered an office in the basement next to the lab animals; she refused it and got a proper office. source
10. 1981 In 1981 Patricia had the idea for a tool that would use a laser to remove cataracts, but her idea was ahead of the technology of the time. source
11. 1980s She faced sexism and racism at work, and U.S. research agencies turned down her requests for grants and resources. source
12. 1986 So in 1986 she took her research to Europe, to eye and laser centers in Paris, Berlin and England, where her work was judged on its merits. source
13. 1986 At the Laser Medical Center in Berlin she ran her first laser experiments on human eyes donated to an eye bank, and after nearly five years of research and testing, her tool worked. source
14. 1986 Her laserphaco probe makes a tiny opening in the eye, breaks up the cloudy lens with laser light and vacuums out the pieces, so a clear new lens can be put in. source
15. 1988 On May 17, 1988, she received a patent for it and became the first Black woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical invention. source
16. 1990s The laserphaco probe was safer and more accurate than earlier ways of removing cataracts, it came to be used around the world, and with it Patricia restored sight to people who had been unable to see for decades. source
17. later On a trip to North Africa she gave a woman who had been blind for 30 years her sight back with an artificial cornea, a new clear front window for the eye, and she called it her personal best moment. source

Try this at home

• Blurry and clear: Look at a picture book through wax paper, then without it. Talk about how a cloudy spot changes what you see.
• Light that bends: Fill a clear glass with water and shine a flashlight through it onto a wall. Watch how the water moves the light, a little like the clear lens in your eye.
• Find another door: Build a block tower. If it falls, try a new way to build it. Count how many tries it takes, just like Patricia did.

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