The challenges—the tasks and the opportunities—facing Wade Hampton Frost as he took up his post at Johns Hopkins were enormous. He was charged with creating an academic curriculum in a discipline where none existed; indeed, the science of epidemiology was only minimally defined. “Epidemiology” means, literally, the study of that which is upon the people. The word in its Spanish form, epidemiología, may have first been used early in the nineteenth century by Joachin de Villalba in writing about diphtheria in Spain. As Frost knew it, the discipline was one of observation and investigation of disease outbreaks, whether by John Snow in his study of cholera in mid-nineteenth-century London or by the Public Health Service team in its efforts to stem an epidemic of yellow fever in New Orleans in 1906. Frost, himself, had investigated outbreaks of typhoid fever, polio, and influenza. Later, epidemiologists would develop statistical techniques and mathematical models that made possible new understanding of the ways in which diseases are transmitted among people, and Frost would contribute in large measure to these advances in methodology and knowledge. But those developments were, as yet, years away.

Much later, with nearly two decades of experience in his academic role behind him, Frost wrote:

That elegant and astute perception of his field took time to evolve, both in Frost’s wisdom and in the understanding of the field by the communities of working health professionals, scholars of disease, and the interested public.

In the fall of 1919, as Frost faced the immediate challenge of creating a curriculum and a department in epidemiology, he had a greater task than that confronted by today’s professors of epidemiology. He could not simply pull together the traditional material covered in such a course and in standard texts, as those trail blazes did not exist.