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Long before anyone ever heard of emergency orders, mask "mandates" and rapid testing, the globe wrestled with a much older malady. The earliest evidence of it among humans appears on ancient Egyptian papyrus going back to around 1550 B.C.E. It spread with close contact.
When Alexander's armies returned to the Mediterranean from India, they brought it with them. The Greeks noticed that those suffering from it had scaly skin that would peel off. In extreme cases, it caused permanent disfigurement and lost limbs. The Greek word for scaly is "lepra." And in the West, that got it the name leprosy for centuries.
Medieval Europe handled it crudely. People suffering from leprosy were assigned special clothing. People rang bells to warn others that an infected person was coming and when they were on the road, they had to stay to one side. It earned the nickname "the separating sickness."
Hawai'i took separation to a new level. Leprosy came to the islands in the 19th century. Native Hawaiians, who had suffered tremendously from the onslaught of other introduced diseases that century, were deeply troubled.
In 1865, the Legislature and King Kamehameha V passed a law allowing the government to purchase an isolated spit of land on the north coast of Molokai as a settlement for people infected with the disease; the area is better known as Kalaupapa.
Many were taken against their will to this peninsula cut off from the rest of the world by mountains and the vast Pacific Ocean. Families were ripped apart and forcibly taken to the settlement.
Nearly 10 years after the Hawaiian government created the Kalaupapa settlement and thousands of miles away, a Norwegian physician, Gerhard Hansen, identified the bacteria that causes leprosy. Strangely, the disease was renamed after him for this scientific breakthrough.
Discovering the bacteria was one thing, but controlling it was much harder. Over the years, the little settlement on Molokai became a world onto itself.
In 1902, a family arrived in Honolulu. The Ball family came from Seattle, Wash. The head of the family, J.P. Ball Sr., was one of the first Black men to perfect the process of printing photographs on metal plates. His son was a lawyer, who married a photographer. They brought their children with them to the islands.
The Balls relocated because the patriarch of the family, J.P. Ball Sr., was in poor health and hoped the tropics would help. It didn't. Mr. Ball died two years later and the rest of the family returned to Seattle.
Ball's granddaughter never forgot the islands. After graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacy, she opted to continue her education at the College of Hawai'i at Manoa.
In 1915, Alice Ball became the first woman and Black person in the country to graduate with a master's degree in chemistry. In her thesis she identified the active components of kava.
It was that thesis that piqued the interest of a surgeon at the Kalihi Hospital. Kalihi was the first stop for those infected with Hansen's disease. If they could not be treated, they could find themselves shipped out to Molokai. Dr. Harry Hollmann was using chaulmoogra oil -- an oil derived from a tropical tree -- to treat his patients. The results were mixed and inconsistent.
Ball jumped at the chance to help. In her spare time when she wasn't teaching chemistry, Ball experimented with different ways of extracting the active ingredient in chaulmoogra. In less than a year, she perfected a water-soluble solution to safely inject the oil, minimize side effects and establish the much-sought-after consistency in treating Hansen's disease.
But before she could publish her work to the world, fate intervened. In 1916, Ball went back to Seattle and was exposed to toxic chemicals at a teaching demonstration. She got sick and died. This hard-working and brilliant chemist was only 23 years old.
In Hawai'i, her method in treating Hansen's disease caught on. The president of the college in Hawai'i, Arthur L. Dean, picked up where Ball left off without crediting her for discovering this method.
Sadly, she was on her way to being forgotten if it wasn't for Dr. Hollmann. A medical journal published Dr. Hollman's research in 1922. He not only attributed Ball but deemed her injection technique "the Ball Method."
Vaccines and more advanced treatment methods have effectively ended the scare, isolation and fears around Hansen's disease. And the world is rediscovering Alice Ball too.
In 2000, the University of Hawai'i mounted a bronze plaque recognizing her achievement. And this week, Gov. David Ige proclaimed Feb. 28 as "Alice Ball Day." Folks remembered her by draping flower lei around the plaque near the long chaulmoogra tree.
* Ben Lowenthal is a trial and appellate lawyer, currently with the Office of the Public Defender, who grew up on Maui. His email is 808stateofaloha@gmail.com.