This Black History Month, The Oregon Clinic is proud to celebrate the incredible accomplishments and lasting impact of Black pioneers in American medicine. The contributions and achievements of these women helped shape modern medicine as we know it today.
Alice Augusta Ball became the first woman and first African American to earn a master’s degree from the College of Hawaii (now University of Hawaii) in 1915, at just 23 years old. She immediately joined the faculty as a chemistry professor and began working on a problem that had stumped scientists for years: how to increase the absorption of chaulmoogra seed oil, a traditional remedy for leprosy, into the human body. Within a year, she’d solved it, creating an injectable form that gave real relief to patients who had been isolated in facilities like Kalihi Hospital in Hawaii. Her innovative technique, the “Ball Method,” became the most effective treatment for leprosy until antibiotics were developed in the 1940s.
Tragically, Ball died in 1916 at age 24, before she could publish her findings. Findings from the research she left behind were published in 1920 without any acknowledgement or credit for Ball’s significant work. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a historian uncovered Ball’s original research and her contribution to helping thousands of patients was finally recognized.
Ball’s legacy endures. Just as she transformed a traditional remedy into modern medicine through chemistry, Black women scientists and physicians continue to bring similar innovation to the medical field.