Wade 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.

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.”