Cataract treatment inventor Dr Patricia Bath dies at 76

Dr Patricia Bath, a pioneering ophthalmologist who became the first African American female doctor to receive a medical patent after she invented a more precise treatment of cataracts, has died.

She was 76.

Bath died on May 30 from complications of cancer at a University of California San Francisco medical center, her daughter, Dr. Eraka Bath, said Monday.

Bath was born in Harlem in New York City. Her mother was a domestic worker and her father worked on the city subway system.

Bath won a National Science Foundation scholarship while a teenager. She graduated from Howard University's medical school and interned in New York.

Bath moved to California where she became the first African American surgeon at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center and the first woman ophthalmologist on the faculty of UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute.

She also co-founded an ophthalmology residency program and in 1983, Bath was appointed Chair of the King-Drew-UCLA Ophthalmology Residency Program, becoming the first woman in the United States to head such a residency program.

"I had a few obstacles but I had to shake it off," Bath told "Good Morning America" 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."
In the 1970s she co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, a nonprofit that declares "eyesight is a basic human right."