At twenty-three she made the best leprosy treatment of its day injectable. Then another man's name went on it.
For centuries the best remedy for leprosy was an oil pressed from the seeds of the chaulmoogra tree, and it barely worked. The oil was too thick to inject cleanly: shots left painful abscesses under the skin, and swallowing it made patients vomit. In Hawaiʻi, where people with the disease were sent away for life to the Kalaupapa peninsula on Molokaʻi, doctors needed something better. In 1915 a physician named Harry Hollmann took the problem to a 23-year-old chemist at the College of Hawaii.
Alice Augusta Ball solved it. She turned the oil's fatty acids into ethyl esters, a form the body could absorb by injection. Within a few years patients treated with her method were being released from hospital. She did not see any of that. She died at 24, before she could publish, and the college president who carried on her work published it under his own name. It took decades, and a few stubborn people, to put her name back.
A short life, a long reach
The lifeline
1892
Born 24 July in Seattle. Her grandfather J. P. Ball was a pioneering Black photographer
1902
The family moves to Honolulu for three years, then returns to Seattle
1914
Second degree from the University of Washington; co-authors a paper in a leading chemistry journal
1915
First woman and first Black person to earn a master's at the College of Hawaii
1915–16
Makes chaulmoogra oil injectable. It becomes known as the Ball Method
1916
Dies 31 December in Seattle, aged 24, before her work is published
By the numbers
The measure of her
24
Her age when she died, months after making the breakthrough
78
Patients discharged from Honolulu's Kalihi Hospital after treatment with her method, reported in JAMA in 1920
8,000+
People exiled to Kalaupapa between 1866 and 1969, the disease her work set out to treat
84
Years from her death until her university gave her a memorial: a plaque, in 2000
What she made
The work
1912–14
Two degrees from the University of Washington, in pharmaceutical chemistry and then in pharmacy.
1914
“Benzoylations in Ether Solution,” co-written with her professor William Dehn and published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
1915
A master's thesis on kava (Piper methysticum), working out the chemistry of the Pacific's ceremonial root.
1915–16
The Ball Method. She isolated the fatty acids of chaulmoogra oil and converted them to ethyl esters. The result could be injected without the abscesses and vomiting the raw oil caused.
1919–40s
The method in use. A college lab was mass-producing the extract by 1919. It remained a mainstay of leprosy care until sulfone drugs replaced it in the 1940s.
Erased, then restored
Recognition
After her death
Died before she could publish a word of her findings
College president Arthur L. Dean continued and published the work. It became known as the “Dean Method”
In 1922 Harry Hollmann credited her in print, but the correction made little impression for decades
Her cause of death went unconfirmed. A 1917 newspaper blamed chlorine fumes from the lab
Today
2000: a University of Hawaiʻi plaque beside the campus chaulmoogra tree
2007: the university's Regents' Medal of Distinction, awarded posthumously
2019: her name added to the frieze of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
2022: Hawaiʻi proclaims Alice Augusta Ball Day. In 2024 her bust is unveiled in the university library
The place that made her work matter
Honolulu & Kalaupapa
She returned as a graduate student to the islands she had known as a child. Hawaiʻi's leprosy laws were among the harshest anywhere: people with the disease were taken from their families and sent to the Kalaupapa peninsula, cut off by sea cliffs. A treatment that worked meant patients could go home.
1907
Founding of the college where she studied and taught, now the University of Hawaiʻi
1866
First patients landed at Kalaupapa. The isolation laws lasted until 1969
1902–05
The childhood years she spent in Honolulu
“I cannot see that there is any improvement whatsoever over the original technic as worked out by Miss Ball.”
— Dr. Harry T. Hollmann, 1922
