After Alice Ball’s death in 1916 at age 24, a white man took credit for her research
On the east side of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s campus, a 25-foot tree with long, narrow leaves and velvety brown fruit pays tribute to Alice Augusta Ball, the first woman and first African American student to receive a master’s degree from the school.
Known as a chaulmoogra, the tree was planted in 1935 in honor of Ball’s groundbreaking research on Hansen’s disease, or leprosy. As a chemist at the university—then known as the College of Hawaiʻi—in the mid-1910s, she developed one of the first effective treatments for the chronic infection, extracting oil from the chaulmoogra fruit’s seeds for injection into the bloodstream.
Before the introduction of sulfone antibiotics in the 1940s, the so-called Ball Method was one of the primary treatments for leprosy, which affects the nerves and skin and can dramatically alter the appearance of the extremities. For decades, however, the woman behind the discovery was overlooked, with the achievements of her short life (she died in 1916 at age 24) forgotten in favor of presenting a male-centric narrative of scientific ingenuity.
“Since we cannot bring Alice back to life, the least we can do is tell the story of her life as honestly and thoroughly as possible so people will know about her outstanding work today and in the future,” says Paul Wermager, a retired librarian who has dedicated the past 20 years to resurfacing Ball’s life and legacy. “She and her work can help educate and inspire [people to] do the seemingly impossible.”
Beyond opening a window into the pervasive racism and sexism of early 20th-century academia, Ball’s story sheds light on a dark chapter in Hawaiian history. Between 1866 and 1969, authorities forcibly removed more than 8,000 leprosy patients, almost all of them Native Hawaiians, to the remote peninsula of Kalaupapa. While white, or haole, leprosy sufferers were allowed to leave Hawaiʻi and seek treatment on the mainland, Hawaiians exiled to the colony were expected to remain there for life—at least until quarantine laws were lifted in 1969.
“It was a total double standard, which is classic during this time,” says Doug Herman, executive director of the Pacific Worlds Institute, a nonprofit that seeks to preserve and share the culture of Hawaiʻi and Micronesia.
Ball was born in Seattle on July 24, 1892, to Black newspaper editor, photographer and lawyer James Presley Ball Jr. and white photographer Laura Louise Howard Ball. She grew up in a middle-class, distinguished family. Her paternal grandfather, James Presley Ball, was a renowned Black photographer who’d captured portraits of such individuals as abolitionist Frederick Douglass, opera singer Jenny Lind and writer Charles Dickens.