University Graduation Photo of Alice Ball from http://www.hawaii.edu/offices/bor/distinction.php?person=ball
When Alice Augusta Ball died on December 31, 1916, she left chemistry bereft of one of the science’s brightest lights. During her lifetime, the opportunities for Black women were narrow unless they could prove themselves extraordinary. She was.
Ball was born on July 24, 1892, in Seattle, Washington. Her grandfather had been a famous photographer and a noted abolitionist. Her father, James Presley Ball, Jr., began as a farmer, went into the photography business with his father, was a newspaper editor, and became a lawyer. Not much is known about her mother, Laura Louise (Howard) Ball, but the family did have boarders living with them, so she may have been managing that small business. Ball’s mother and father met in Montana and moved around the west coast a fair amount, finally making a home for decades in Seattle.
As was common at the time, the Balls lived in an extended family, with a paternal grandfather and aunt in the household for many years. When Ball was a teenager, her family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, to help with the elder Ball’s arthritis, but he died after only a year, so the family returned to Seattle. Ball graduated in 1910 from the Seattle High School, where her best subjects were in the sciences, which was unusual for girls and women at the time, but not unheard of.
It was in college, though, that Ball’s true intellectual talents were allowed to flourish. In a short time she earned two degrees (1912 and 1914) in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of Washington and even co-authored an article with one of her professors. By 1915, she had a master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Hawaii and earned a professorship there as well; this made her the first woman and Black to earn that degree and teach in the chemistry department at that university. By 1916, she developed a better method (called the Ball Method) for injecting chaulmoogra oil directly into the bloodstream of leprosy sufferers, which greatly improved the use of that oil for their health. The Ball Method was used until the 1940s, when even more effective treatments were developed.
The discovery of the Ball Method was not only a development of a new method for injecting the oil; it required discovering the active chemicals within the oil that helped leprosy patients. Ball worked with Harry T. Hollmann at the Kalihi Hospital, where they were struggling with a large number of leprosy cases. At that time it was common for anyone diagnosed with the disease to be arrested and just sent off to the clinic to die, but the hospital was trying to help them.
Ball’s work was almost lost to us when she died at the age of just 24, on December 31, 1916. The president of the University of Hawaii was also a chemist, and he took up her work and published it under his own name, naming the processes to extract and use the active chemicals in leprosy treatment after himself. Luckily, in 1922, Hollmann stood up for Ball and published an article explaining how she was the one who had discovered the active chemicals and developed a better delivery method for them.
The University of Hawaii did not officially honor her until 2000, when it placed a dedication plaque at the base of the only chaulmoogra tree on their campus. Since 2000, Alice Ball Day is celebrated on February 29th by the entire state of Hawaii; however, doesn’t that make you wonder why they observe this only in Leap Years? In 2007, the Board of Regents for the University of Hawaii gave her a Medal of Distinction, which is displayed at the campus’s Hamilton Library, where her portrait hangs. In 2016, Hawai’I Magazine ranked her as one of the 14 most influential women in the state’s history. In 2017, the Alice Augusta Ball Endowed Scholarship was established at the University of Hawaii to help students studying biology, chemistry, or microbiology. In 2020, a short film was released about Ball’s life.
There is a debate in modern scholarship about why she died; some say tuberculosis, while others claim it was from poison after demonstrating techniques to protect against gas attacks, a worry that was growing in the world and which would prove all too correct when poison gas was used widely in World War I. Regardless of why she died, she died too young. When you think of how much she accomplished in just a few short years, imagine what she could have accomplished with a few more decades to research, develop, and teach. Her work was almost lost to us because of the sexism and racism that existed in the United States, even in Hawaii, in the beginning of the 20th century, which continues to this day. That she was able to achieve so much should bring us hope that people can and will overcome discrimination.