Today on Monday Mysteries we have a story I ran across when looking for interesting stories about early women photographers.

Except, today’s story isn’t exactly about photographers. That’s the thing — you just never know what kind of story you’ll run across while looking in photographic archives. Last week, on a trip to the University of Washington special collections, the archivist pointed out that one of the names on their photographers’ reference list is James Ball, Sr., who was a pioneering African-American photographer in the 19th century. His career took him around the U.S., and he had studios in many places, including Seattle. He later moved his studio to Hawaii, but after his death his family moved back to Seattle, where his daughter-in-law took over running the photography business.

But it’s not his daughter-in-law that I want to talk about; rather, it’s her daughter, Alice August Ball. Alice was not a photographer, though. She was a chemist, and a very talented one at that. She attended the University of Washington; while she was still only an undergraduate she had a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

After graduation, she was offered scholarships to go to either UC Berkeley or the University of Hawaii. She chose to go back to Hawaii to study, and in 1915 she became the first woman and first African-American to get a master’s degree from the University of Hawaii

But it was while working on her post master’s research that she had a big scientific breakthrough: she discovered a treatment for Hansen’s disease, which is more commonly known as leprosy. There were no treatments for that disease circa 1915, but Ball discovered a treatment that actually worked!

The treatment — the one that Alice Ball discovered; the one that was used successfully to treat leprosy patients for decades — was celebrated for many years as …  the “Dean Treatment”.

Wait!? What!?

Well, the easy explanation is that the president of the University of Hawaii, one Arthur L. Dean, published her findings under his own name, stealing credit for the breakthrough, and naming the treatment after himself.

Now, Dean’s claim was quite quickly challenged by a doctor who had worked with Ball, but it took decades for the record to be corrected and the work to be properly attributed to Ball (and then re-named the “Ball Treatment”.) The University of Hawaii finally got around to honoring Ball only in 2000. Better late than never, I guess.

But you may be wondering, why didn’t Ball challenge Dean’s claims herself? Well, sadly, Ball died in 1916, so she didn’t live to see her technique so widely (and successfully) adopted. Since she didn’t live to publish her own work, it was each for Dean to take over and claim he’d made the discoveries himself.

Indeed, Ball was only 24 when she died; it’s actually the story of her death that prompted today’s blog post, not the fact that she was denied credit for so many years; that’s an all-too common happening in the history of woman in the 19th and 20th centuries, unfortunately.

But the stories about Ball’s death are a true Monday Mystery. You see, in reading a couple of different accounts about her on the web (e.g. here and here, and elsewhere), I’m not finding a consistent story about how she died.

On the one hand, since Ball worked really, really long hours, some attribute her death to simple exhaustion.

But there’s another story that says she was careless when demonstrating chlorine gas in class at the university one day, and she accidentally inhaled some, dying weeks later from the effects of that poisonous gas.

Then there’s mention of the fact that her death certificate was adjusted quite a while after her death, changing the cause of death to have been tuberculosis. But apparently nobody believes that she really died of TB.

Hmm. So how did she really die?  It’s not clear, at least not from my very limited (i.e. an hour on the Internet) research effort.

Now, in general it’s clear that there needs to be more of a celebration of Ball and her achievements as the woman who discovered a treatment for leprosy.  But I hope that when someone does that, they will also take a careful look into the oddly competing stories surrounding the death of Alice Augusta Ball.

And that is what I’ll leave you to ponder on today’s Monday Mystery.