Alice Ball is a name that was almost erased from history. At just 23 years old, Alice revolutionized the treatment for leprosy—a feared and misunderstood disease that carried a dark history in Hawaii. In this episode, we will explore Alice’s groundbreaking work, her struggle for recognition, and the decades-long fight to reclaim her legacy. Follow us on Instagram @watchhercookpodcast Sources: A Woman Who Changed the World Race Relations During the 1890s Overlooked No More: Alice Ball, a Chemist Who Created a Treatment For Leprosy The Chemist Whose Work Was Stolen From Her UWSOP: Alumni Legend Alice Ball The History of Hansen's Disease In Hawaii Alice Ball: The US Chemist Who Developed the Ball Method A Wholesome Horror: The Stigmas of Leprosy in the 20th Century Kava History on the Islands What is Jim Crow The Compromise of 1877 Why Don’t More of Us Know Her Name? Alice A. Ball is Hidden in History Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the story behind Alice Ball's overlooked legacy?
Imagine spending months planting a garden. You choose the soil carefully. You water it each morning. You stay up late designing the perfect landscape, measuring the light, learning what grows best in the shade. But just when the first flower blooms, someone else picks them, signs their name at the bottom of the bouquet, and opens their own flower shop. Things aren't always what they seem.
Sometimes beautiful stories come with dark and dishonest twists, and often the stories we're told and believe are not the whole picture. But eventually, the truth does find its way to the surface. Even when it's buried or overlooked, it has a way of resurfacing, rising through the cracks. The work, the stories, the legacy, they can't stay hidden forever. In the end, truth will always prevail.
This is Watcher Cook. Hello everyone, I'm Cassie. And I'm Danielle. Welcome back to Watch Her Cook, a podcast dedicated to sharing the incredible lives of women who have taken their power back throughout history.
I loved your introduction because you're such a garden girl.
I'm trying to be. I'm really, I'm getting into my garden era. It's funny that you say that because right before we hopped on this recording... Al and I were both, my partner, Al and I were both on Pinterest looking at how to design gardens to make them really pretty this year. And he was going over all these plants.
He's like, I'm going to build you a big awning and all the wood, nice fencing around it to make it fun. And he was finding these branch sculptures to put around and little birdhouses to throw around the garden. So I'm in my garden era for sure.
Quite the improvement from last year when you're like, I'm just throwing wildflower seed everywhere and hoping for the best.
Hey, we'll see. Some of them are supposed to pop up the second year. So we'll see how I did this year, I guess. Well, we aren't talking about gardens today. But we are talking about an incredible woman named Alice Ball. She is absolutely incredible. And you may have never heard of her because her story was kept secret for quite some time.
Alice Augusta Ball was a trailblazing scientist whose work profoundly reshaped medical treatments for leprosy in the early 20th century. With an unwavering drive and relentless curiosity, she discovered a method that transformed an age-old remedy into something far more effective, offering relief to those who had long suffered without hope.
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Chapter 2: Who was Alice Ball and what were her early life and family background?
This allowed white Southern leaders to regain power, dismantle Reconstruction reforms, and enforce Jim Crow laws, ushering in an era of segregation and racial oppression.
The Jim Crow laws were named after Jump Jim Crow, a character created in the 1830s by white performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice dressed in blackface. So just keep that in mind for a second. Jim Crow was not a real person. And if you're familiar with all the Jim Crow laws that follow that, it's really interesting and also very concerning.
This character, along with other blackface characters, aimed to perpetuate negative stereotypes about African Americans, painting them as lazy, ignorant, hypersexual, criminal, or cowardly.
The new laws supported a system of white supremacy and reversed much of the progress the Reconstruction period had made. Though the amendments remained in place, white leaders found loopholes to segregate black Americans, adopting a separate-but-equal ideology.
This meant that while Black Americans had access to public services such as schools, transportation, restaurants, and public restrooms, the options available to them were intentionally inferior.
The laws also included provisions to disenfranchise Black men, meaning to deprive them of their right to vote, while racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan terrorized Black communities through violent acts, including public lynchings that were treated as spectacles.
Although strict Jim Crow laws were primarily enforced in the southern states, racial discrimination permeated the entire U.S., creating significant barriers for Black Americans. As we tell Alice's story, we will come to see how her achievements, despite these broader societal limitations, further highlight her remarkable resilience and determination.
Circling back to how Alice's parents put white on her birth certificate, that just speaks volumes to the lengths they were trying to go to provide any sort of equal opportunity for their daughter. And it reminds me a lot of the episode you did on National Park After Dark a long time ago. So I apologize, I don't remember their exact names. But didn't you do an episode where
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Chapter 3: What was the political and social climate for Black Americans during Alice Ball's time?
a individual in the South pretended to be or tried to pass off as white to escape to the North.
Yes, Ellen Craft. Not only did she try to pass off as white, but she also tried to pass success and successfully did so as a man. And she escaped with her husband from the South all the way up to the North to Boston.
Yeah, that one was a wild story and one that has stuck with me for a while. But it did remind me of this as being like, this is our only hope of trying to make it in this world is passing off as white and it's just it's so disheartening and it also like i said speaks so much to her parents willing to make that concession you know it's giving up part of her her identity you know
Yeah, it's trying to hide a part of who she is from the moment she's born.
And I think it does really stem back to when you have a child, when you do everything you can to protect them and to know that the society that they're about to grow up in is completely pinned against them and the odds of them getting the education they deserve and becoming the successful person that they dream their child can and should be
is going to be thwarted at every opportunity that they get. So starting from day one, being like, I'm going to do something about this. And I imagine, I don't know offhand exactly what the backlash of that would be, but I imagine that there would be some type of repercussion for lying on her birth certificate.
Definitely. Definitely. I actually was just watching a TikTok video that has been making its rounds of just this woman walking through, and I don't remember the exact museum, but she was just walking through a memorial dedicated to Black Americans that were lynched and the reasons for their deaths. And they were all so heartbreakingly simple. Like,
She would say their name, their age, and the reason they were lynched. So it would be like, I don't know, Joe Smith, age 13, publicly lynched for asking a white woman for a sip of water. And she just went on and on and on for, you know, like three minutes of just listing out all of these people who lost their lives during this time for something as simple as that.
I would definitely imagine if this ever came to light or they were ever prosecuted for this, there would be significant consequences to that.
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Chapter 4: How did Alice Ball's family navigate racial identity challenges?
After graduating in 1912, Alice enrolled in the University of Washington. Over the course of four years, she earned a bachelor's degree in pharmaceutical chemistry along with a bachelor's degree in pharmacy. While studying, she co-authored a paper titled Benzoylations in Ether Solution with chemist William Denn, a professor at the University of Washington.
It focused on a type of chemical reaction called benzoylation and appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, one of the most prestigious chemistry publications of the time.
Following her undergraduate studies, she was invited to pursue her master's degree at both the University of California and the College of Hawaii. Heading back to her childhood roots, Alice seized the opportunity to study in Hawaii with a focus on medicinal and organic chemistry.
She centered her thesis around kava, known locally as awa, a plant native to the Pacific Islands revered for its sedative and psychoactive properties. It was traditionally used in spiritual and medicinal rituals, but there was little scientific research around its potential therapeutic properties or potential toxicity.
Using her expertise, Alice was able to extract cavalactomes, the main active components in kava, which contributes to its sedative and muscle-relaxing effects. This extraction was important because it allowed for a more precise understanding of kava's medicinal properties, provided a foundation for controlled research into its safety and efficacy, and helped legitimize its use in Western medicine.
Alice graduated in 1915 as the first woman and the first African American woman to receive a master's degree at the College of Hawaii. She also became the college's first black female chemistry instructor. And before we move on, not to derail from Alice's story because she's wonderful, but... I learned something in this research, and it has to do with kava.
It has provided the missing puzzle piece to a personal story.
Okay. Now I'm very, very intrigued.
You know this story, and you're going to laugh.
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Chapter 5: What were Alice Ball’s academic achievements and scientific contributions?
We look at each other and we're like, are you feeling what I'm feeling? Because I'm feeling great. I am flying high. And turns out it was kava. And I totally understand now when it says it was used for its psychoactive and sedative properties. Because I experienced that first time and it was so great. It is a feeling I'll be chasing for the rest of my life.
Well, you won't have to chase it too far because now you know exactly what it is. And thank you, Alice, for your contributions.
A nod to Alice. Thank you, girl. I know it has nothing to do with... She's doing something else. She's doing something for humanity here. That is arguably for humanity.
oh my god happiness is important to humanity god that was such a good time now that i'm like actually thinking about it i would love to go back there and i i know we asked on national park after dark if any listeners knew of that bar because i described it more in detail and somebody wrote back to us and said yeah i know it because i i worked there oh wow small world yeah i know anyways interesting
Back to Alice and her incredible accomplishment of becoming the first African-American woman to receive a master's degree at the College of Hawaii.
Yeah, incredible. And also, don't forget, she also became the college's first Black female chemistry instructor as well.
And she was invited back to do her master's at two different places. Which is also incredible. Yeah. I don't even think I got into two undergrad colleges. And I had to ask. No one asked me.
No one was like, please come here.
Yeah, I was like, can I please come there and I'll pay you everything, every penny I have.
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Chapter 6: What is kava and how did Alice Ball contribute to its scientific understanding?
I'll dedicate the next 30 years to paying you back. Right.
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Chapter 7: How did Alice Ball's work gain recognition in the medical field?
And they're put in different hospitals and there's a lot of shame around it and a lot of misunderstanding.
Okay, so now we're reflecting. We've done three episodes on this. We've done the New River Gorge. We've done Kalapapa. Well, that was tuberculosis. Yeah, but like, oh yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
We like to talk about diseases. I guess we do. And exiles that happen with them. Interesting. I'm learning a lot about us, as well as Alice.
Yeah, we're reflecting back a lot today. For leprosy, there was actually a cure. It was Chalmugra oil. Extracted from seeds from the Hydona carpus tree, which was native to South and Southeast Asia, the oil contained active compounds that were believed to have antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties.
The challenge was that the oil's consistency was thick and sticky, which made it extremely difficult to administer to patients. It did not properly absorb when applied to the skin and often caused stomach pain and vomiting when ingested and gave patients large, painful bumps under their skin when it was injected.
Because of this, the effectiveness of the oil was inconsistent. Some patients showed improvement, while others experienced little to no results or severe side effects. These challenges made it clear that a better delivery method was needed and was why Dr. Hallman turned to Alice.
Knowing her expertise, he was intrigued by the possibility of extracting the active ingredient from the chalmugra oil, much like she had done with the awa plant.
Alice dedicated herself tirelessly to her research, balancing her duties as a university instructor by day and conducting experiments on chalmugra oil late into the night. Despite only being 23 years old, she accomplished in less than a year what many seasoned chemists had struggled with for decades.
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Chapter 8: What is leprosy and how did Alice Ball's discovery impact its treatment?
She successfully isolated the active ingredient, meaning that the oil retained its medicinal properties while also being easily absorbable. This breakthrough was coined the quote ball method. So no more of those like giant painful lumps under their skin and injections. And imagine already being sick with leprosy and then. taking this medication that's making you vomit and just feel awful.
And she's mitigated all that. She's like, I'm going to take all that out. And you just have the good stuff now.
Yeah, what she's done. And we can talk a little bit about leprosy, just for a moment, because I think it's incredible how I've never seen somebody with leprosy. in real life. Of course, I've researched it, and especially for the Kalapapa episode that we did a few years ago, and it's memorialized in photographs and things like that throughout history.
But the second you hear leper or leprosy, you have this almost visceral reaction of like, I want to stay away from that. And we must have learned that somewhere along the line.
Well, if you think the phrase that was coined from probably leprosy was like he was a leper to society, like he was an outcast almost like there's sayings that go around it, too.
Well, the shunning of people and othering of people who are suffering from this disease, it just feels like it's been throughout history conflated with, you know, avoidance, complete isolation, like I can't ever be near you. And of course, we touched on that a little bit.
But I just think it's really interesting to note that even now as a listener or somebody learning about this right now, the reaction your own body has when somebody says, you know, somebody suffering with leprosy, you're almost like, I'm not even involved, but I don't want to be near that.
So to know that Alice has created this method that is going to help that and help people that are suffering from this. and not have to go through painful treatment that sometimes makes it worse. Or it doesn't help at all. Right. It's such an accomplishment.
And by 1918, it was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that 78 people with leprosy at the Kalihi Hospital who received the treatment were free of lesions and were discharged. And between 1919 to 1923, no new patients were exiled to the settlements on the Malakai Peninsula. Alice's technique was successfully used until an antibiotic was introduced in its place in the 1940s.
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