Frost, Wade Hampton (1880–1938)

Wade Hampton Frost was a pioneering epidemiologist. Following a distinguished career in the United States Public Health Service, he became the first professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. He made seminal observations on the epidemiology of infectious diseases and major contributions to epidemiological methods.

Frost was born in Marshall, Virginia, on March 3, 1880. He attended the University of Virginia, graduating in 1903 with both bachelor's and medical degrees. After internships in New York, he enlisted in the U.S. Public Health Service in 1905. In 1908, he was assigned to the National Hygienic Laboratory in Washington, the forerunner of the National Institutes of Health.

Frost studied water pollution at the National Hygienic Laboratory. His paper describing a typhoid outbreak in Williamson, West Virginia, in 1910 is an exemplary report of a field investigation. Between 1909 and 1912, he coupled assays of neutralizing serum antibodies with careful field investigations of polio outbreaks in Iowa, Ohio, Kentucky, and New York. From these studies, he formulated the concept that asymptomatic poliovirus infections in children were common and produced immunity. In 1913, Frost was placed in charge of a newly opened station in Cincinnati, Ohio, to study pollution of the Ohio River and other inland waterways. When the 1918 to 1919 influenza pandemic erupted, he directed the Public Health Service's Office of Field Investigations of Influenza, there working with statistician Edward Sydenstricker, who would become a lifelong friend and collaborator. Frost devised the system of tracking influenza epidemics by using reported pneumonia and influenza deaths as a surrogate in the absence of reporting requirements for influenza itself.

In 1919, William Henry Welch recruited Frost to the newly founded Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health to become a resident lecturer, the first faculty member in the new department of epidemiology. He was promoted to professor in 1921 and was elected dean in 1931. Frost developed a curriculum based on lectures, case studies of actual epidemics, and student theses that has served as a model for curricula in epidemiology to the present. He was idolized by students for his work with them in casestudy laboratories. His initial investigations at Johns Hopkins focused on acute infectious diseases; later, he worked on tuberculosis, studying the natural history of that disease in Williamson County, Tennessee. Out of this work came the first enunciation of the index case concept and the use of life tables to express data as person-years and to estimate secondary attack rates. His best-known work may be his analysis of shifting tuberculosis age profiles using historical data from Massachusetts. With Lowell Reed, he developed the first mathematical expression of the epidemic curve.

[Page 402]Frost died of esophageal cancer on May 1, 1938. Shortly before his death, the American Public Health Association awarded him its prestigious Sedgwick Memorial Medal.