On This Day in History: February 29

Alice Ball: White dude steals credit for Black woman's leprosy treatment

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If I was going to be taken from my family and sent to live isolated from the rest of society, I suppose there are worse places to go than Hawaiʻi. The island of Molokai housed a leper colony, and a young Black woman was the first to find an effective treatment, but her contribution to science was stolen by a white dude.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: February 29, 2000--

Anyone who’s read the Bible, or at least watched Ben-Hur, knows that leprosy, also called Hansen’s Disease, has been around a long time. But not in Hawaiʻi. It was brought to the islands in the 19th century and due to a lack of immunity among the inhabitants it spread quickly. The contagious nature of the affliction generated the typical cries of “Unclean!” and those afflicted were gathered up and sent to live separate from the rest of society. Alice Ball found a way to help them.

A chemist, Ball was the first woman and the first Black person to receive a master’s degree from the University of Hawaiʻi. Born in Seattle in 1892, she received two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Washington in pharmaceutical chemistry and the science of pharmacy. An exceptional student, she was offered numerous scholarships to pursue a master’s, and chose Hawaiʻi, graduating in 1915.

At the time, the best treatment for leprosy was chaulmoogra oil, made from the seeds of a tree found in India. But the treatment was too sticky to apply topically, it wasn’t absorbed when injected, and it tasted like ass and you barfed it up if you tried to swallow it. Ball modified the oil to make it injectable so that it would be absorbed by the patient. Then she died. The cause of her 1916 death at the age of only 24 is unknown. It may have been from accidental chlorine poisoning in the lab. She never published her findings, and some white motherfucker stole Ball’s work and took the credit.

Arthur L. Dean was a chemist with a PhD from Yale and also president of the university. You’d think he could become famous all on his own rather than needing to steal from a deceased young Black woman. But nope. He stole her work, named it after himself, and started mass producing the chaulmoogra injectable Ball invented. And it worked. It was the preferred treatment for leprosy for the next quarter century.

In 1922, Dr. Harry Hollmann, a surgeon at Kalihi Hospital who’d encouraged Ball’s study of chaulmoogra oil, published a paper giving her credit, referring to it as the “Ball Method,” but it was ignored. It wasn’t until five decades later that other researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi began a campaign to see Ball get the recognition she deserved. It was a lengthy campaign, but on February 29, 2000, Alice Ball was honored with a plaque placed next to the campus’s only chaulmoogra tree; the state’s lieutenant governor named February 29 to be “Alice Ball Day.” She has since received numerous other posthumous honors.

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