Wade Hampton Frost was an American epidemiologist.
Background
He was born in the village of Marshall, Virginia, near the Blue Ridge Mountains, the seventh of eight children of Henry and Sabra J. (Walker) Frost. His father was a country physician who had moved to Virginia from Charleston, South Carolina, just after the close of the Civil War, in which he had served as a surgeon in the Confederate Army.
Education
Growing up in rural surroundings, Frost received his primary education at home from his mother, a brilliant woman with rare gifts as a teacher.
At the age of fifteen he was sent for a year to a military school at Danville, Virginia, and then to Randolph-Macon Academy for another year (1896 - 97).
After working for a year in a village store, he entered the University of Virginia, from which he received the B. S. degree in 1901 and two years later the degree of M. D.
Career
After a year of internship at St. Vincent's Hospital, Norfolk, Virginia, Frost was commissioned, in February 1905, a medical officer in the United States Public Health Service and was ordered to duty at the Marine Hospital in Baltimore.
In August of the same year he was assigned to special temporary duty at New Orleans, where he joined a group of medical officers assembled to combat an epidemic of yellow fever. As a result of their intensive efforts to suppress the breeding of the mosquito vector, the epidemic was terminated, and yellow fever has not reappeared in the United States since that time.
After a tour of duty in examining immigrants and as a medical officer attached to the Coast Guard, Frost in the fall of 1908 was assigned to the Hygienic Laboratory in Washington, D. C. Then well launched on its congressional directive "to investigate the diseases of man, " the laboratory ultimately developed into the Microbiological Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
One of its functions, then and later, was to assist the states in the control of epidemics. While learning laboratory techniques, Frost participated in several field investigations of outbreaks of typhoid fever and poliomyelitis.
In 1916 there occurred in the vicinity of New York City one of the most devastating epidemics of poliomyelitis ever recorded. Frost participated in field investigations, the results of which (presented in Public Health Bulletin No. 91, July 1918, and in a previous series of reports by Frost) form the cornerstone of the epidemiology of this disease.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Frost was detailed to serve with the American Red Cross. While engaged in these activities he was found to have incipient pulmonary tuberculosis and spent six months in a sanatorium near Asheville, North Carolina; the infection was arrested and caused him no further trouble. Returning to duty, he engaged in studies of the pandemic of influenza in 1918 with the collaboration of Edgar Sydenstricker, a statistical economist. Under their joint supervision morbidity surveys were conducted in eighteen representative localities of the United States, and a number of papers by Frost, Sydenstricker, and their colleagues were published describing the epidemiological characteristics of influenza.
In the autumn of 1919 the Johns Hopkins University established its School of Hygiene and Public Health. Temporarily assigned there as resident lecturer, Frost later became professor of epidemiology.
This marked the transition of that study from a descriptive to an analytical and properly disciplined science, closely integrated with other fields of medical science and biology.
He died in the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and was buried at Middleburg.
His experience with typhoid led next to his assignment as director of a field laboratory located in Cincinnati, Ohio, where a staff of epidemiologists, sanitary engineers, bacteriologists, and biologists had been assembled for comprehensive studies of water pollution and purification.
Membership
He was a memeber of the Department of Epidemiology from 1919.
Connections
On February 10, 1915, Frost had married Susan Noland Haxall of Exning, near Middleburg, Virginia. They had one child, a daughter, Susan Haxall.