Dr. Patricia Era Bath became the first woman elected to the honorary staff of the UCLA Medical Center.

 

 

 Dr. Patricia Era Bath 

(November 4, 1942 – May 30, 2019)

 

Dr. Bath returned to her Harlem community and interned at Harlem Hospital Center, which had just become affiliated with Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. 

During her internship, she observed large proportions of blind patients at Harlem Hospital in comparison to patients at the Columbia University Eye Clinic. 

Prior to beginning her ophthalmology residency study at NYU in 1970, she was awarded a one-year fellowship from Columbia University to study and contribute to eye care services at Harlem Hospital. 

She began to collect data on blindness and visual impairment at Harlem Hospital, which did not have any ophthalmologists on staff. 

Her data and passion for improvement persuaded her professors from Columbia to begin operating on blind patients, without charge, at Harlem Hospital Center.^[15] 

Bath was proud to be on the Columbia team that performed the first eye surgery at Harlem Hospital in November 1969.

She served her residency in ophthalmology at New York University, from 1970 to 1973, the first African American to do so.^[5][4] She got married and had a daughter, Eraka, in 1972.^[4]