CeCe on Patricia Bath

Transcript

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So Doctor Patricia Bath noticed something nobody else was writing down. Her Black patients in Harlem were going blind at twice the rate of her white patients.

And it wasn't genetics, it was access. They couldn't get to an eye doctor. So she invented a whole field for that, and called it community ophthalmology.

But she wasn't finished, because she kept losing patients to cataracts. Now mind you, back then they took cataracts out by hand, with a blade. So she figured out how to do it with a laser instead, faster and way more precise.

And she became the first Black woman doctor in this country to patent a medical device. Come to find out, some of the people she treated had been blind for thirty years.

And she gave them their sight back.