She was twenty-three when she solved a problem six centuries old — and dead before she could sign her name to it.
In the summer of 1915, a young chemist in Honolulu was handed a bottle of the most frustrating medicine in the world. Chaulmoogra oil, pressed from the seeds of an Indian tree, had been used against leprosy since at least the 1300s — and it half-worked, in the cruellest way. Swallowed, it was so acrid it made patients vomit. Injected, it was so thick it sat under the skin in blistering rows instead of entering the blood. For six hundred years the only treatment for Hansen's disease had been a treatment nobody could take.
Alice Ball had just become the first woman and the first Black American to take a master's degree from the College of Hawaiʻi. Within about a year she had taken the oil apart — saponifying its fats, isolating the fatty acids, converting them to ethyl esters — and produced something that could be injected and absorbed. Then, at twenty-four, she died, before publishing a single word of it. Her department head put the method into production under his own name.
Twenty-four years
The lifeline
1892
Born in Seattle to a family of photographers; her grandfather was among the first Black American daguerreotypists
1902
The family sails to Honolulu for her grandfather's health — three island years that would call her back
1914
Graduates the University of Washington and publishes in the Journal of the American Chemical Society
1915
First woman and first Black American to earn a master's at the College of Hawaiʻi; hired as its first woman chemistry instructor
1915–16
At twenty-three, makes chaulmoogra oil injectable — the first effective treatment for Hansen's disease
Dec 1916
Dies in Seattle on the 31st, aged twenty-four, with the work still unpublished
By the numbers
The measure of her
24
Years she lived — Seattle to Honolulu and back again
600+
Years chaulmoogra oil had been used against leprosy before she made it usable
78
Patients discharged from Kalihi Hospital after her injections, reported in JAMA in 1920
6
Years after her death before her name was attached to her own method
What she made
The work
1914
“Benzoylations in Ether Solution,” with her pharmacy instructor Williams Dehn, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society — she was the first African American published in that journal.
1915
A master's thesis on the ʻawa root, Piper methysticum — the plant chemistry that brought Dr Harry Hollmann of the Leprosy Investigation Station to her door.
1915–16
The Ball Method. Saponify chaulmoogra oil, isolate its fatty acids, convert them to ethyl esters: a compound that could be held in aqueous suspension, injected, and actually absorbed.
1919
Production at scale — a college laboratory turning out the injectable extract in quantity, three years after she died, under another man's name.
1920
Seventy-eight people went home. Discharged from Kalihi Hospital by the board of health examiners — the first time a leprosy diagnosis was not necessarily a life sentence.
to 1946
The only effective treatment for Hansen's disease anywhere in the world, for three decades, until the sulfone drug dapsone replaced it.
Erased, then restored
Recognition
In her lifetime, and after
She died before publishing a word of the chaulmoogra work
Arthur L. Dean, her advisor and the college's president, scaled up the process and published it without her name
The technique was taught for years as “the Dean Method”
She appears nowhere in Dean's published papers on the extract
Her death certificate names chlorine poisoning only as speculation; no cause was ever settled
Since
1922 — Hollmann publishes a correction and calls it “the Ball Method” throughout
2000 — the University of Hawaiʻi sets a plaque at its lone chaulmoogra tree behind Bachman Hall
2007 — the Board of Regents awards her its Medal of Distinction, the university's highest honour
2019 — her name is added to the frieze of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, beside Nightingale and Curie
2022 — Hawaiʻi proclaims 28 February Alice Augusta Ball Day
The islands that made her, and the ones she changed
Honolulu
She first came to Honolulu as a child in 1902, when her family sailed from Seattle hoping the warm air would ease her grandfather's arthritis. She came back at twenty-two for a master's degree — and stayed to teach in a chemistry department that had never had a woman in it. Ninety kilometres away, on the Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokaʻi, thousands of people, most of them Native Hawaiian, were living out sentences of exile for a disease they had not chosen. Her work is the reason some of them came home.
8,000+
People exiled to Kalaupapa, Molokaʻi, between 1866 and 1969
103
Years the Hawaiian isolation law stood before it was lifted
1
Chaulmoogra tree on the Mānoa campus — the one that now carries her plaque
“I cannot see that there is any improvement whatsoever over the original technic as worked out by Miss Ball.”
— Harry T. Hollmann, 1922 Archives of Dermatology and Syphilology
Almost none of Alice Ball's own words survive. The sentence that saved her name was written by a colleague, six years after she died.
