Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Foreword by George W. Comstock
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 By What Name?
- 2 Origins
- 3 Marshall
- 4 Health of the People
- 5 Drink No Longer Water
- 6 Susan
- 7 Dread Diseases
- 8 Baltimore
- 9 Professor
- 10 Epidemiologist
- 11 Sunset and Evening Star
- Bibliography of Publications by Wade Hampton Frost
- Abbreviations of Scientific Journal Titles
- Notes
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Foreword by George W. Comstock
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 By What Name?
- 2 Origins
- 3 Marshall
- 4 Health of the People
- 5 Drink No Longer Water
- 6 Susan
- 7 Dread Diseases
- 8 Baltimore
- 9 Professor
- 10 Epidemiologist
- 11 Sunset and Evening Star
- Bibliography of Publications by Wade Hampton Frost
- Abbreviations of Scientific Journal Titles
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Epidemiology at any given time is something more than the total of its established facts.
—Wade Hampton FrostWade Hampton Frost spent the last two decades of his life at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The first ten years of his tenure there were largely devoted to launching the science of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins and throughout the public health and medical worlds of North America. He continued his work on influenza and water pollution, an enduring interest of his, and he remained a consultant to the United States Public Health Service in the latter area even after he resigned his commission. Yet important, broader, and more fundamental ideas were germinating in his fertile mind. During his second decade in Baltimore, he made major contributions to his discipline. They were not made in abstract or theoretical contexts. Rather, they were anchored in investigations of major epidemic diseases. Fundamental and important papers came forth, often coauthored with his students or junior faculty colleagues. Some of the fundamental concepts and techniques he pioneered are known to the world principally through the works of those to whom he taught them.
Ernest Stebbins, one of Frost’s students in the early 1930s and later dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, reflected on Frost’s interactions with his students and junior colleagues vis-a-vis their research, interactions that in the current world of science would almost certainly have meant coauthorship of the resulting paper.
I’d have my tables and what I had drafted as a paper, and he would go over it carefully, and he’d look for those jokers with you. Oh, he devoted an awful lot of time to his students…. A number of papers that I wrote should have had his name on [them], because he did just as much as I did, but he wouldn’t…. I would have been so proud to have his name on a paper with mine, but he said, “no, you did this research. I’m just reviewing it with you.”
Similarly, Miriam Brailey, who studied with Frost and then joined his faculty, acknowledged Frost in a footnote to a 1937 paper reporting her study of tuberculosis in children at the Harriet Lane Pediatric Tuberculosis Clinic, noting that he “directed the analysis of data from clinical records.”
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- Wade Hampton Frost, Pioneer Epidemiologist 1880-1938Up to the Mountain, pp. 165 - 194Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004