Alice Augusta Ball was born in Seattle on July 24, 1892, the third child of James Presley Ball Jr. and Laura Howard Ball. She earned two pharmacy-related degrees from the University of Washington, then pursued graduate studies at the College of Hawaii. Ball was the first African-American and first woman to earn a master's degree in chemistry at the school and the first Black person to become an assistant professor. Her life was cut short in 1916 at age 24, but she left behind a remarkable legacy – the first effective treatment for leprosy, an ancient and dreaded disease that brought its victims disfigurement, disability, scorn, and segregation. Ball died before she could publish her findings and her research was appropriated by the president of the university, Arthur Dean, also a chemist. He published her discoveries as his own, with slight and unnecessary embellishment. The treatment pioneered by Ball thereafter was known as the Dean Method and used worldwide until antibiotics brought a cure for leprosy in the 1940s. It would be nearly a century before Alice Ball was given the credit she was due, and the Ball Method, as it is now known, is credited with vastly improving the lives of leprosy victims on every continent except Antarctica.
Roots
Alice Augusta Ball was the third child of James Presley Ball Jr. (1851-1923) and Laura Howard Ball (1869-1945), the couple's second daughter of three. She had two brothers, one of whom was fathered by James in 1885, before he met and married Laura Howard in Montana in 1890.
The Ball family had deep roots in the nineteenth century's free Black community, which numbered 476,748 in the 1860 federal census, living in both the North and the slave states of the South. This represented about 10 percent of the total Black and Mulatto population of 4,441,730; the other 90 percent were held in enslavement.
Available records can reliably trace the Ball family to the early 1800s, when Alice Ball's great grandfather, William Ball, married Susan Gregory in Virginia on November 14, 1814. Since Virginia did not keep a record of marriages between enslaved persons, one or both were either free African Americans or white. The 1840 federal census classified William (d. 1863) and Susan Ball (d. 1875) as Black, but various later official records identified them, and their descendants, as either Black, Mulatto or, not infrequently, white. Over the next 100 years the family seemed able to easily cross the color line in both directions. When Alice Ball died in 1916, the death certificate issued by the Washington State Board of Health identified her as white, as had her birth certificate. Quintard Taylor Jr. (1948-2025), founder of BlackPast.org, noted. "This may have had less to do with phenotype and more to do with what the Balls thought about themselves culturally" ("Overlooked No More …").
An Accomplished Family
Alice Ball's grandfather, James Presley Ball Sr. (1825-1904), was born in Virginia, one of at least four children of William and Susan Gregory Ball. In the early 1840s both the Ball and Gregory families moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. The first practical method for taking photographic images was the daguerreotype, invented in 1837 by a French theatrical scene painter, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851). It was a complicated chemical process that produced finely detailed images on copper plates coated with highly polished silver. James Presley Ball Sr. learned the technique in 1845 after a chance meeting with a Black Bostonian daguerreotypist named John B. Bailey.
For a few years Ball plied his trade on the road, but in 1851 returned to Cincinnati and opened a studio, which did well. In 1853 he established a studio and gallery in a much larger space, displaying examples of his and others' work. Soon it was "the city’s prestige establishment for portraits of prominent citizens done in the grand manner" ("Struggles Many and Great …"). In 1856-1857 Ball spent six months in Europe and was thought to have taken images of Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria; if so they have never surfaced. There does exist a daguerreotype he took of the famed Black author, orator, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). Ball was also well-known in Britain and America for his vocal and financial support of abolition.
Alice Ball's father, James Presley Ball Jr., worked with his father in Cincinnati and later, in Minneapolis. While in the latter city in 1885 he fathered a son, Robert, mother unknown, whom he raised. In 1889 the family moved to Helena, Montana, where James Sr. and Jr. opened the J. P. Ball & Son photographic studio. In February 1890 James Jr. married Laura Howard in Helena, and on the marriage certificate both were listed as Black. Their first child, William Ball (1890-1928), was born the following December.
In late 1890, or perhaps early in 1891, the young family and James Ball Sr. moved to Seattle. On March 27, 1892, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a small item announcing the opening of the Globe Photographic Studio at 2nd and Marion streets, "[h]andsomely fitted up and supplied with the latest novelties in apparatus, scenery, accessories, etc." ("A New Photographic Studio"). It was operated by James Sr., James Jr., and Laura Ball. Four months later, on July 24, 1892, James and Laura's third child, Alice Augusta Ball, was born.
James Jr. had worked in Montana as not only a photographer and, briefly, a newspaper editor, but also as an attorney. On the certification of the Montana Supreme Court he was admitted to practice in Washington, and shortly after arriving in Seattle he and his father opened a combined law and real estate office in the Stetson-Post Block at 910 2nd Avenue. This was also the location of the Globe Photographic Studio.
The Education of Alice
Very little has been recorded about Alice Ball's personal life, and nothing about her social life, if she had one. From her accomplishments, it seems likely that her primary devotion was to science, and at that she excelled. Despite being raised in a family of professional photographers, there are only three available images of her, two in academic garb. There does not seem to be any extant photographs or daguerreotypes of her mother or father, although both were photographers.
Alice spent her first 10 years in Seattle, but almost nothing is known of her childhood before high school. She attended T. T. Minor Elementary School until late 1902 or early 1903, when the extended family moved to Honolulu for the health of James Ball Sr., who suffered from severe arthritis and other medical problems. He died there on May 4, 1904, and the remaining Ball family returned to Seattle. James Jr. concentrated on his law practice and real estate, while Laura Ball ran the reopened Globe Photo Studio.
Alice Ball finished her grade-school education at T. T. Minor and began ninth grade at Broadway High School (called Seattle High School until 1902). She earned excellent grades, particularly in the sciences, and graduated in 1910, one month short of her 18th birthday. Ball enrolled at the University of Washington, majoring in pharmaceutical chemistry. She earned her bachelor's degree in pharmaceutical science in 1912 and two years later was awarded a bachelor's degree in pharmacy. In the latter year she co-authored with one of her instructors an 11-page article titled "Benzoylations in Ether Solution" that was published in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society. Her academic performance brought two post-graduate research scholarship offers, from the University of California and the College of Hawaii (after 1920, the University of Hawaii). She chose Hawaii.
After settling in at the college in Manoa on Oahu, Ball worked in the chemistry lab, researching and writing her thesis and conducting other work under the instruction of the lab's director, Arthur Lyman Dean (1878-1952), who was a chemist and also president of the college. In 1915 she became the first African-American woman to earn a master’s degree in chemistry. Her thesis, "The Chemical Constituents of Piper methysticum," analyzed the various compounds of the kava (or ava) root, which had long been used to treat anxiety and depression. Her study focused on the active ingredients responsible for the root's physiological effects. Later in 1915 Ball became the first African-American to be hired as an assistant professor at the college, dividing her time between the laboratory and the classroom.
An Ancient Scourge
Leprosy is one of the oldest diseases to afflict humanity, and until the mid-twentieth century, one of the most dreaded. The earliest physical evidence of the disease was found in a 4,000-year-old skeleton unearthed in India, but genomic studies indicate it is far older. Leprosy (now preferably called the less-stigmatizing Hansen's Disease) is caused by a bacterium, Mycobacterium leprae, first identified by a Norwegian physician, Gerhard Armauer Hansen (1841-1912) in 1873. It is closely related to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes tuberculosis. Some scientists estimate that the ancestors of M. leprae and M. tuberculosis split off from another organism as long ago as 36 million years and developed as distinct diseases in rough parallel.
Unlike tuberculosis, leprosy is rarely fatal, but for most of history the disease was tremendously stigmatizing because of the disfigurement it could cause and the belief that it was highly contagious. In fact, the bacteria is not easily spread, and compared to other bacteria, is highly indolent. Symptoms often don't appear for years after infection and then progress very slowly, but if untreated, relentlessly. Untreated leprosy would cause irreversible damage to nerves, muscles, eyes, skin, and the respiratory tract. Permanent paralysis, blindness, and damage to hands, feet, and face were common outcomes. Nasal septa would essentially rot away, causing the nose to collapse. In many cases eyelashes and eyebrows also disappeared and facial skin thickened and furrowed, resulting in what scientists labeled "leonine facies" ("Leonine Faces …"), or "lion faces."
Minor physical injuries would go unnoticed and untreated because the nervous system's peripheral pain receptors had died off. Infections often followed, fingers and toes were lost, and skin over much of the body became inflamed and scaly. Motor nerves were also affected and small muscles atrophied, causing shortening of the fingers and toes.
Before the cause of the disease was discovered, leprosy was almost universally considered a curse rather than a sickness, its sufferers tainted by evil. As the Old Testament commanded:
"The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, 'Unclean, unclean.' He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp" (Leviticus 13: 45-46).
Before effective treatments were developed, leprosy victims were almost always isolated from their communities, either housebound or forced into sequestered "colonies," such as Kalaupapa on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. That former colony is now a national historical park. In the 1910s, the efforts of a Honolulu surgeon and Alice Ball, while not a cure, would liberate many from the most dire consequences of the disease.
The Scientist and the Surgeon
Dr. Harry T. Hollmann (1878-1942) was a surgeon at the Kalihi Leprosy Hospital outside Honolulu. He became interested in an ancient folk remedy for leprosy, chaulmoogra oil, derived from several species of Hydnocarpus, a tree native to Asia. It was a staple of India's ayurvedic medical tradition and had been used extensively in the East for hundreds of years, but didn't come to the attention of Western medicine until the mid-nineteenth century.
Chaulmoogra oil was not a cure, but it stayed the progress of leprosy. Applied topically, it was of minor benefit, but used internally, particularly in the early stages of the disease, it brought significant benefits and enabled many afflicted people to lead relatively normal lives. But there were barriers to wide use. It was a thick and distasteful oil, and if taken orally caused extreme nausea and vomiting, severe enough to require stopping treatments. Subcutaneous and intramuscular injections of the thick oil prevented the vomiting, but were extremely painful and often caused severe local reactions, skin ulcers, and high fevers.
It isn't recorded precisely when or how Dr. Hollman learned of Alice Ball, but he may have read her master's thesis on kava root or learned earlier that she was in the process of researching it. He contacted her and suggested that she study chaulmoogra oil and try to derive an effective, injectable form that would lessen its toxicity. She agreed, and working in her limited free time, by early 1916 Ball had developed the first preparation of a purified, water-soluble, injectable form of chaulmoogra oil. As she had done with her thesis work on the kava root, she isolated the ethyl esters of the fatty acids in the oil taken from seeds of the tree. The result was a compound that could be easily injected and absorbed by the body. It was the first treatment for leprosy that was both effective and well-tolerated. It could halt and even reverse disease progression, and eliminated the toxic side effects that previously had limited its usefulness. Her effort revolutionized the treatment of the disease and enabled the afflicted to lead relatively normal lives within the larger society. Until the 1940s and the development of curative antibiotics, chaulmoogra oil was the frontline treatment for Hansen's Disease, liberating although not curing tens of thousands of victims around the world.
Then, late in 1916, Ball reportedly inhaled chlorine gas while doing a laboratory demonstration for a class she was teaching. She became quite ill and returned to Seattle to be with her family. On December 31, 1916, she died, age 24 years, five months, and eight days. Her original death certificate listed the causes as "removal of tonsils (two years ago), excess inhalation of chlorine gas," with "chronic asthma" ("Death Certificate") a contributing cause. After the college denied the chlorine-gas claim, the document was altered to give the cause of death as "tuberculosis" ("Black History 365 …"), which it almost certainly was not.
Taking Credit
Her illness and early death prevented Ball from publishing her findings. But someone did – her supervisor and College of Hawaii president, Arthur Lyman Dean. He claimed that at the time of her death, Ball's work was not complete and that his efforts were necessary to produce a viable treatment. At the time his assertions were not questioned, and as a result the process of making the chaulmoogra oil tolerable and effective came to be known as the Dean Method. In 1920 and 1921, he and coauthors published two scholarly reports on the development of the chaulmoogra-oil treatment and its efficacy. In neither did they even mention Alice Ball or give credit for her work.
One person knew better: Dr. Harry Hollmann, who had originally proposed the research to Ball. Perhaps in response to Dean's claims, in 1922 Hollman published an article in a peer-reviewed medical journal, the Archives of Dermatology and Syphilology titled "The Fatty Acids of Chaulmoogra Oil in the Treatment of Leprosy and Other Diseases" (Arch. Dermatol. Syph. 5). In it, without directly accusing Dean or others of usurping Ball's research, he unequivocally gives Alice Ball full credit for the discoveries Dean had claimed:
"About the time that Rogers and Ghosh were starting their investigations in India, in Hawaii I interested Miss Alice Ball, M.S., an instructress in chemistry at the College of Hawaii in the chemical problem of obtaining for me the active agents in the oil of chaulmoogra.
"After a great amount of experimental work, Miss Ball solved the problem for me by making the ethyl esters of the fatty acids found in chaulmoogra oil, employing the technic herewith described:
'BALL’S METHOD OF MAKING ETHYL ESTERS OF THE FATTY ACIDS OF CHAULMOOGRA OIL'" (Hollmann, p. 95).
Commenting on Dean’s claim to have perfected Ball’s work, Hollmann was direct: "I cannot see that there is any improvement whatsoever over the original technic as worked out by Miss Ball. The original method will allow any physician in any asylum for lepers in the world … to isolate and use the ethyl esters of chaulmoogra fatty acids in treating his cases, while the complicated distillation in vacuo [as required by the "Dean Method"] will require very delicate, and not always obtainable, apparatus." (Hollmann, p. 97). Hollmann added, "Eighty-four patients who have been on the treatment for periods ranging from four years to three months have become bacteriologically negative and free from all lesions of the disease and have been discharged from segregation” (Hollmann, p. 97).
Hollmann’s article was of interest to a very narrow range of readers and went largely unnoticed for decades. Ball would not get her due until more than 80 years after her death, long after the "Dean Method" was replaced by curative antibiotics in the 1940s.
A Long Time Coming
Stanley Munfur Ali (1933-2023) retired as an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, having been a store inspector for the Food Stamp program. He then lived in Hawaii for 14 years, and in the 1970s began researching the history of African Americans in the Territory of Hawaii, during which he learned about Alice Augusta Ball. Also in the 1970s, apparently by pure coincidence, Kathryn Waddell Takara (b. 1943), a poet and professor at the University of Hawaii, came across Ball’s story. Both tried to further publicize their findings, without notable success. Leprosy was no longer a threat, and the intellectual deceit that robbed Ball of the credit she deserved had happened more than 50 years in the past. The first official recognition did not come until 2000, when the university placed a plaque lauding her achievement under the campus's only chaulmoogra tree. But the plaque also gave credit to Dean. The state's lieutenant governor spoke at the ceremony and declared February 29 "Alice Ball Day." The date seemed oddly dismissive, as it would only be celebrated every fourth year.
It was still more years before wider recognition came, and when it did it was in large part due to a University of Hawaii librarian, Paul Wermager. In 2004 he gave a lecture about Ball. He read from a 1921 newspaper interview of Dean in which Dean graciously credited a few others, including Hollmann, for contributing to "his" discovery. Dean did not mention Ball, which may have prompted Hollmann to set the record straight in his paper published the next year. Wermager's lecture got the ball rolling again, but slowly. He would later provide the initial funding for the university's Alice Augusta Ball Endowed Scholarship.
Over the next 20-plus years, Ball would be honored by a number of organizations in a number of ways. In January 2007 the Board of Regents of the University of Hawaii honored her work and memory with its highest award: the Regents Medal of Distinction, posthumously conferred. Her life story was recounted internationally by such organizations and institutions as the National Women's History Museum, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the British Pharmacological Society, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and a host of others. In 2022 Hawaii's governor signed an order changing the date of Alice Ball Day to February 28, and in 2024 a life-sized bust of Ball was unveiled at Hamilton Library on the UH Manoa campus. In February 2026 what is now universally recognized as the Ball Method was designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society. In its announcement the society wrote:
"This Landmark underscores the obstacles that women and Black scientists have historically encountered in establishing themselves as leaders in their fields, as well as the importance of correcting the historical record to honor the critical contributions of these scientists for the good of humanity" ("Alice Augusta Ball: A Trailblazing Chemist ...").
Alice Ball Park
In 2019 the city where Alice Ball spent the greater part of her life and where she came home to die honored her memory and accomplishments by creating a park in her name adjacent to the Greenwood Branch of The Seattle Public Library. It is well-loved and well-used, and joins 12 other Seattle parks that are living memorials to the contributions of individual African Americans who shaped the city’s social, political, and cultural fabric. It took a long, long time, but Alice Ball and the world-changing treatment for leprosy that she pioneered are at last fully recognized and properly acknowledged.
