By Elise Knutsen
If such a thing is possible, 1921 was a good year in the leprosy unit at Kalihi Hospital in Honolulu. Hundreds of patients who had been rounded up, quarantined, and exiled to the Hawaiian leprosy center were actually showing progress after receiving a new treatment.
“The morale of the patients in the hospital is excellent and in striking contrast to that of former days when a leperous person was doomed to a long term of isolation, in most cases to be terminated only by death,” observed the U.S. Surgeon General’s annual report that year.
The treatment, engineered in the chemistry laboratory at the University of Hawaii, was known as the Dean Method after Dr. Arthur Dean, president of the university.
The Dean Method, however, is not Dean’s at all. The key research behind the treatment was conducted by Alice Ball, a brilliant African American chemist whose name has been all but scrubbed from the history of medicine.
