Who Is Alice Ball?
She was 23 when she made the first leprosy treatment that worked. She was 24 when she died. Her boss put his name on it and kept it there for ninety years.
By Teona Abuladze · 9 min read
In 1915, if you were diagnosed with leprosy in Hawaii, you were removed.
Not treated. Removed — from your house, your work, your children — and sent to the settlement at Kalaupapa on Molokai, a peninsula backed by cliffs and surrounded by sea, chosen precisely because nobody could leave it. Families said goodbye at the dock. Many never met again.
There was one substance that seemed to help: chaulmoogra oil, pressed from the seeds of a tropical tree, used in India and China for centuries.
The problem was that nobody could get it into a human body.
Swallowed, it was so bitter that patients vomited, and the body barely absorbed it. Injected, it was too thick — it sat under the skin in painful blisters and abscesses that were arguably worse than the disease.
For decades doctors had known the oil worked and had no way to deliver it.
The person who solved that was a twenty-three-year-old chemistry instructor named Alice Augusta Ball.
Who she was
She was born in Seattle in 1892, into a family of photographers — her grandfather, J. P. Ball, was a well-known daguerreotypist, and she grew up around chemicals and darkrooms and the idea that you could change a substance to make an image appear.
She was a serious student. Two degrees from the University of Washington. Then she moved to Hawaii and became, in 1915, the first woman and the first African American to earn a master’s degree from the College of Hawaii. Then its first woman chemistry instructor.
She was twenty-three years old.
Her master’s thesis — a forty-four-page chemical analysis of the kava plant — reached Dr Harry Hollmann, an assistant surgeon at the leprosy investigation station in Honolulu. He read it, recognised what she could do, and asked whether she would take on the chaulmoogra problem.
She said yes.
What she did
She worked out how to isolate the active compounds in the oil and convert them into ethyl esters — a form that was water-soluble, that could be injected, that the body would actually absorb, and that left no abscesses and no taste.
It took her about a year, in a laboratory where she was also teaching full time.
It worked. In 1920, seventy-eight patients in Honolulu were treated with it. The following year, ninety-four more. The Public Health Service noted that the morale of every patient improved dramatically — because for the first time there was something that might work.
People began to leave Kalaupapa. Some went home.
Her method remained the most effective treatment for leprosy in the world until sulfone drugs arrived in the late 1940s.
For the first time, people sent away to die were going home.
What happened next
On 31 December 1916, Alice Ball died. She was twenty-four.
The cause has never been established with certainty. The most commonly cited explanation is that she was exposed to chlorine gas during a laboratory demonstration and never recovered.
She had not yet published.
That detail is the hinge of this entire story. Unpublished work has no name attached to it — and hers was sitting in a laboratory at the College of Hawaii, finished and unclaimed.
Arthur L. Dean was the chair of the chemistry department, a Yale PhD, and shortly afterwards the president of the university.
He took over the project. He mass-produced the treatment and shipped it around the world. He published a series of papers on chaulmoogra oil under his own name, with a minor modification to her process.
And he renamed her discovery the Dean Method.
He never credited her. Not once.
The chaulmoogra work was the first and only pharmaceutical chemistry Arthur Dean ever did.
The man who tried
Harry Hollmann — the doctor who had brought her the problem in the first place — knew exactly what had happened.
In 1922 he published a paper stating plainly that Alice Ball had created the solution, and calling it, correctly, the Ball Method. He pointed out that Dean’s alteration was not an improvement on anything.
It was ignored.
One paper by a hospital physician against the sustained output of a university president is not a fair fight, and it went the way those fights go. For roughly two decades her treatment travelled the world under another name, and almost nobody outside that small college knew that a young Black woman had invented it.
Ninety years
Her name came back slowly, and because women went looking for it.
The Hawaiian historian Kathryn Takara came across Ball’s original thesis and started pulling at the thread. The librarian and researcher Paul Wermager spent years documenting what she had done and what had been done to her.
In 2000 — eighty-four years after her death — the University of Hawaii finally honoured her. They fixed a bronze plaque beneath the last remaining chaulmoogra tree on campus. The lieutenant governor declared a day in her name.
In 2019 the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine added her name to the outside of its building, alongside the men who had been there for a century.
There is now an Alice Ball scholarship, and a short film, and a day marked in Hawaii each February.
She had been dead for eighty-four years before her own university put up a plaque.
What this story actually is
It’s tempting to file it under theft, next to Elizabeth Magie and Hedy Lamarr, and it belongs there. But there’s something specific here worth naming.
Alice Ball was not overlooked. She was not overshadowed, or under-cited, or lost in a large team. A man with institutional power took the finished work of a dead twenty-four-year-old employee, put his name on it, and ran it for two decades — and the one colleague who objected in print was simply outweighed.
That was possible because of exactly three things: she was young, she was a woman, and she was Black. Change any one of them and the arithmetic of who gets believed changes with it.
And notice what was at stake. This wasn’t a board game or a patent. Her method took people out of forced isolation. Every person who walked off that peninsula in the 1920s did so because a twenty-three-year-old in Honolulu worked out how to make an oil dissolve.
For most of a century, none of them knew her name.
She was young, she was a woman, and she was Black. Change any one of those and the arithmetic changes.
The last tree
There is something almost unbearably apt about where her plaque ended up: bolted to the trunk of the last chaulmoogra tree standing on that campus.
Not a building. Not a hall. The tree her work came from — the only one left.
She had four years as a working chemist. In that time she became the first woman to hold a master’s degree at her university, its first woman chemistry instructor, and the author of the most effective leprosy treatment on earth.
She never knew that it worked. She never saw the patients go home. She never got to publish, and so she never got to sign her name to it.
Ninety years later, we can.
Shansi means chance. She had twenty-four years and used them better than most people use eighty.
It was never the Dean Method. It was hers.
Sources: National Geographic; The Conversation; National Women’s History Museum; University of Nebraska Medical Center; Mushtaq & Wermager, “Alice Augusta Ball,” Clinics in Dermatology, 2023; University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
