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It Is Written

John Bradshaw

More Than Meets the Eye: The Remarkable Patricia Bath

Coming up next, please stay tuned for It Is Written, presented by Pastor John Bradshaw.

I want to tell you about a woman who changed the world against the odds.

A woman who opened the eyes of countless people and, in the process, taught the world an important lesson.

For most people, looking up into a clear evening sky brings a sense of wonder and awe, witnessing the glittering greetings of stars shining in the heavens.

Although there are billions of stars in the universe, the most you can see with the naked eye at any 1 time is only a few thousand.

But what you're able to see can be absolutely breathtaking Well think of a sunrise sunset snow-covered mountains or a hillside in autumn remarkable visuals that can leave you Exhilarated Science tells us that more than 80% of our information and understanding of our world comes through sight, making your eyes incredibly important.

But what if you damage or lose your sight?

There's no cure for glaucoma, for example.

Glaucoma is a group of eye conditions that damage the optic nerve.

Around 20 million Americans have age-related macular degeneration, which, while it doesn't usually cause complete blindness, happens when a part of the retina called the macula is damaged, destroying central vision and the ability to see fine details.

The leading cause of blindness worldwide is cataracts, which is when the lens of the eye becomes clouded.

More than half of the blindness cases in the world are due to cataracts, with more than 19 million people in the world experiencing bilateral blindness from cataracts.

It seems that cataracts have been treated since about 400 years before Moses was born.

And cataract surgery was mentioned in a first century medical encyclopedia.

Early cataract surgery, as you might imagine, was a primitive affair.

And even though a clouded lens was surgically removed by an ophthalmologist in Paris, France as early as 1748, it would be another 200 years before English ophthalmologist Sir Harold Ridley would discover a method to replace a natural lens damaged by cataracts with an artificial lens.

A life-changing It Is written humanitarian project, Eyes for India, has provided free cataract surgery for thousands of India's poor during the last 10 years or so.

Several decades ago, advancements were made in the treatment of this form of blindness by a remarkable and tenacious young American woman from New York City.

Patricia Bath was born in Harlem on November 4, 1942.

Her father had emigrated from Trinidad and was a merchant Marine, a newspaper columnist, and the first black motor man for the New York City subway system.

Her mother was a domestic worker who saved her earnings to invest in the education of Patricia and her brother.

While Patricia's father instilled in her a sense of discipline and curiosity about the world in which she lived, her mother fueled that curiosity by buying Patricia a chemistry set when she was a young child.

With the encouragement of her parents, young Patricia devoted herself to getting the most out of her education.

By the age of 16, she'd already earned a place in the National Science Foundation workshop on cancer research.

And her future in science looked as bright as any star in the darkest midnight sky.

Fueled by a love of books and of science, she excelled at school, becoming the editor of Charles Evans Hughes High School's science paper.

Charles Evans Hughes High School was in the Chelsea district, which is where Madison Square Garden is, near to the Empire State Building.

But Patricia was raised in Harlem, miles away.

According to Patricia, there was no high school in Harlem when she was going to school.

But that didn't stop her from winning numerous academic awards and graduating from high school in just 2 and a half years.

Fueled by an insatiable curiosity to understand her world, Patricia devoted herself to helping to cure and prevent blindness.

She earned a bachelor's degree from Hunter College in 1964, a medical degree from Howard University in 1968, and then returned to New York to begin a fellowship in ophthalmology at Columbia University.

In the course of her research, Patricia noticed that African Americans were twice as likely to suffer from blindness than the other populations with whom she interacted.

She discovered this wasn't due to genetics, but instead to lower levels of awareness of the symptoms leading to blindness, also a lack of education, and a lack of financial means needed to access preventative care.

In 1973, she became the first African American to complete a residency in ophthalmology, and in 1975, the first female faculty member in the Department of Ophthalmology at UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute.

Later she would become the first woman in the nation to chair such a prestigious academic department.

In 1976, she co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, building on the results that were being delivered from her community-based ophthalmology system.

As she worked to combat blindness of the eyes, Dr.

Patricia Barth had a front row seat in society's struggle with another type of blindness.

It wasn't until 1964, the same year she received her undergraduate degree, that The government of the United States passed laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

This was a time of upheaval within society.

Patricia had to battle both blindness of the eyes and blindness of the heart.

Barth stated she encountered both sexism and racism in her professional and academic career.

The barriers she came up against in the United States didn't exist in Germany, France and England, countries where she could pursue scientific research and develop inventions that would better the human race.

She was a pioneer, a trailblazer and an inventor.

And she taught a lesson that still needs to be learned today.

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It's made up of more than 2 million working parts.

The retina alone has approximately 6 million cones and 120 million rods.

The 6 million cones see color and they're divided into red, green and blue, while those 120 million rods are photoreceptors, light receivers.

The eye is a camera essentially, and a phenomenally good 1.

Even Charles Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, to suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." Ophthalmologist Dr.

Patricia Bath accumulated a long list of achievements.

She became the first African-American resident at New York University.

She married and gave birth while completing a fellowship in 1974 in corneal and keratoprosthesis surgery.

When she became the first woman ophthalmologist to be appointed to UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute in 1974, she was offered an office in the basement next to the lab animals, she said.

She refused the space and ended up with what she described as acceptable office space.

She said, "...I decided I was just going to do my work." Her work with the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, which aimed to protect, preserve and restore the gift of sight for all, regardless of race, gender, age or income level, saw her travel broadly, performing surgery, teaching new medical techniques and donating equipment.

By 1983, she was chair of the Ophthalmology Residency Training Program at Drew UCLA, the first woman in the United States to ever hold such a position.

She said 1 of the highlights of her career occurred on a humanitarian mission to North Africa, when she restored the sight of a woman who had been blind for 30 years by implanting an artificial cornea.

She said, the ability to restore sight is the ultimate reward.

But she wasn't satisfied with just helping prevent cataract blindness in at-risk communities.

Searching for a better way to treat cataracts, she developed the Laser-Faco probe, a device that used lasers to vaporize cataracts in a patient's eyes, enabling a surgeon to then remove the lens and insert a replacement.

It took almost 5 years to complete the necessary research and testing, And in May 1988 she became the first African American female doctor to receive a patent for a medical device.

The Laser Phaco probe made it possible for people who had been blind for as long as 40 years to have their sight restored.

Ultimately, inventor and research scientist Patricia Barth would receive 5 patents.

From Harlem, New York came a trailblazer, a visionary.

And given the times in which she lived, an unlikely candidate to make a giant contribution to medicine and science.

She was the wrong gender, wrong color, and she grew up in what she described as relative poverty.

Her mother scrubbed floors so she could go to medical school.

Surgery was dominated by males and blacks were excluded from many medical schools and medical societies.

And yet she broke through 1 glass ceiling after another.

For further proof of that, let's go back together 2, 000 years.

Jesus was born in a barn to humble parents, and in the eyes of many, in questionable circumstances.

After his birth, his bed was a feeding trough.

When the local governor ordered he be put to death, his family fled to another country, seeking to escape an oppressive regime.

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More Than Meets the Eye: The Remarkable Patricia Bath

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