[3] He was born at Naples, to an English father, William Ball, and a Swizz mother, Julie Autran (1807–1852).

[3][4] He studied medicine under Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours and Jean-Martin Charcot and was an assistant of Charles Lasègue at the Salpêtrière Hospital.

[3] Ball advocated against psychic disorders being separated from the rest of medicine, stating that "the work of the mind coincides with phenomena of a purely physical".

In 1885, he published a trail-blazing treatrise entitled La morphinomanie, in which he evidenced the toxic effects of cocaine which were not absolutely acknowledged at the time.

[2] His wife's brother and sculptor, Robert Carrier de Belleuse (1848–1913), made a bronze bust that adorns Ball's tomb in Montmartre Cemetery.