Alice Ball: The Chemist Whose Cure Was Renamed After a Man

She made the cure work. The man who ran her college put his name on it.

In 1915 a twenty-three-year-old chemist solved a problem medicine had failed at for a century. She was dead within two years. Less than a year after that, the president of her own college began publishing her method under his name.

Her name was Alice Ball.

She was born in Seattle in 1892 into a family of photographers. Her grandfather, J.P. Ball Sr., was one of the most accomplished Black daguerreotypists in the country, and she grew up around chemistry before she ever formally studied it. She took two degrees from the University of Washington, in pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacy, and published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society before finishing her undergraduate work.

Then she went to Honolulu. She became the first woman and the first African American to earn a master’s degree from the College of Hawaii, and the college hired her as its first woman chemistry instructor.

A century of failure

The problem waiting for her was chaulmoogra oil.

For centuries the oil was the only thing that did anything at all for Hansen’s disease. Physicians in India and Burma had used it for generations. Western medicine picked it up in the nineteenth century and hit a wall immediately.

The oil was useless in practice. Swallowed, it made patients vomit. Rubbed on the skin, it did nothing. Injected in its raw form, it was too thick and too sticky to disperse, and it sat under the skin in painful blisters that never absorbed. Doctors tried emulsifying it. They tried mixing it with camphor. Nothing held.

At Kalihi Hospital in Honolulu, patients were not being treated. They were being detained. Hawaii operated a forced isolation policy, and people diagnosed with Hansen’s disease were separated from their families and shipped to the settlement at Kalaupapa on Molokai. A working injection was not a research curiosity. It was the difference between a life and a sentence.

In Honolulu, Ball became involved with the Leprosy Investigation Station, where director George McCoy and assistant surgeon Harry Hollmann had been working the chaulmoogra problem for some time without solving it. They needed a chemist who could isolate the active components of a stubborn botanical oil. Given Ball’s expertise, they brought her the problem.

Within roughly a year, she had it.

Ball isolated the fatty acids in chaulmoogra oil and converted them into ethyl esters. The esters were soluble. They could be injected. They dispersed in tissue instead of pooling. The body absorbed them. The compound kept the therapeutic activity of the original oil and lost the properties that made it unusable in a human being.

That is the entire breakthrough. One chemist, one technique, one year, on a problem that had defeated the field for decades.

She fell ill in Hawaii and returned home to Seattle, where she died on December 31, 1916, at twenty-four. She had not yet published.

What Arthur Dean did next

Arthur L. Dean was a chemist and the president of the College of Hawaii. After Ball’s death, he took up her work.

He did not credit her.

Dean scaled up production of the esters, made a minor procedural change involving vacuum distillation, and published a series of papers in which the technique appears as his own. It circulated in the medical literature as the Dean Method. Hospitals used it. Patients received it.

The compound worked. Her name was not on it.

Hollmann is the reason we know. In 1922 he published a paper reporting 84 patients he had treated who had become bacteriologically negative and free of all lesions, and he named the source of the method without ambiguity. The esters, he wrote, were “isolated by Miss Ball for my use in treating leprosy.” Ten days before she died she had written him a letter describing her method, and it is believed his paper quotes it directly.

That correction sat in the literature and did essentially nothing for seventy years. The name that stuck was Dean’s.

The erasure was structural, not accidental

There is a version of this story where a young chemist dies before publishing and history simply loses track. That version is wrong, and it is worth being precise about why.

Ball had a documented supervisor who knew what she had done. She had a thesis, a faculty appointment, and a laboratory record. The correction was published in 1922 by the physician who commissioned the work. Dean was the president of the institution that employed her and held the archive that could have settled it.

None of the pieces were missing. The information sat in Honolulu the entire time. What was missing was any institution with a reason to act on it.

Ball was Black, a woman, dead, and twenty-four. Dean was white, a man, alive, and running the college. The record did not fail. It was simply never read by anyone with the standing to make it count.

It took historians decades to rediscover Hollmann’s 1922 paper and reconstruct what Ball had done. In February 2000 the university dedicated a plaque in her memory at the chaulmoogra tree on the Mānoa campus, and Hawaii governors have since issued proclamations declaring February 28 Alice Augusta Ball Day. She was awarded the University of Hawaii Board of Regents Medal of Distinction posthumously in 2007. On February 26, 2026, following a nomination by UH president emeritus David Lassner and retired Hamilton Library department head Paul Wermager, the American Chemical Society designated the Ball Method a National Historic Chemical Landmark.

That is a hundred and ten years between the discovery and the plaque with the right name on it.

What was actually taken

The chaulmoogra esters remained the standard treatment for Hansen’s disease until sulfone drugs replaced them in the 1940s. For roughly twenty-five years, Ball’s compound was the best thing medicine had, and it was administered to patients across the world under another chemist’s name.

Not credit in the abstract. Twenty-five years of the only working treatment for a disease that took people’s families away from them, attributed to the man who scaled up what she built.

She had one year in the laboratory and she solved it. They named it after him.

The record is incomplete. We fill it. Enter the archive.