[4] Her father was an immigrant from Trinidad, a newspaper columnist, a merchant seaman and the first black man to work for the New York City Subway as a motorman.

[8][9] Patricia and her brother attended Charles Evans Hughes High School where both students excelled in science and math.

[10] Inspired by the French Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer's work in medicine,[6] Bath applied for and won a National Science Foundation Scholarship while attending high school; this led her to a research project at Yeshiva University and Harlem Hospital Center studying connections between cancer, nutrition, and stress.

[11][12] In this summer program, led by Rabbi Moses D. Tendler, Bath had studied the effects of streptomycin residue on bacteria.

[15] The highlight of the award ceremony was the meeting of Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, at the US Embassy in Belgrade.

She organized and led Howard University medical students in providing volunteer health care services to the Poor People's Campaign in Resurrection City in the summer of 1968.

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

While a fellow, she was recruited by both the UCLA Jules Stein Eye Institute and Charles R. Drew University to co-found an ophthalmology residency program at Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital.

She then began her career in Los Angeles, becoming the first woman ophthalmologist on the faculty at Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA.

When asked who her mentor was, Bath responded by saying her relationship with family physician Cecil Marquez inspired her to pursue this specific career.

The graduates of the OATP are key personnel to provide screening, health education, and support for blindness prevention strategies.

[5][11][19] While at UCLA Jules Stein Eye Institute, Bath established the Keratoprosthesis Program to provide advanced surgical treatment for blind patients.

[21] She resigned her position as chair of ophthalmology and followed her research pursuits as visiting professor at centers of excellence in France, England and Germany.

[23] Being a strong advocate for telemedicine, Bath had supported the innovation of virtual labs, as a part of the curriculum in ophthalmology residency training programs, to provide surgeons with more realistic experience, made possible by 3D imaging.

[23] Based on her observations at Harlem Hospital, Bath published the first scientific paper showing the higher prevalence of blindness among Blacks.

[25][26] Bath also found that African American people had eight times higher prevalence of glaucoma as a cause of blindness.

[30][3] Bath claims her "personal best moment" was while she was in North Africa and using keratoprosthesis, was able to restore the sight of a woman who been blind for over 30 years.

[11] The device — which quickly and nearly painlessly dissolves the cataract with a laser, irrigates and cleans the eye and permits the easy insertion of a new lens — is used internationally to treat the disease.