As winter crept into Baltimore in late 1937, it became apparent that Wade Hampton Frost was not well. He was troubled with abdominal pain, and he had difficulty swallowing. He was losing weight. In January 1938 he cancelled a planned visit to his daughter in Boston because of chest pain. Soon it became evident that he had cancer of his esophagus. Even today that cancer is one that is hard to eradicate, and for Frost there was not much hope. Ironically, it was epidemiological methodology, much of it pioneered by Frost, that would later establish the link between this form of cancer and cigarettes, to which Frost was addicted.

As the illness progressed, Frost spent increasing lengths of time in the hospital. Several poignant letters written by Frost to his wife from his hospital bed survive, but are not dated. One appears to have been written at a time when a biopsy or other tests had been performed and he was awaiting the results from Louis Hamman, a leading Johns Hopkins clinician who was apparently one of Frost’s attending physicians. Its accepting, almost fatalistic tone is similarly present in the other surviving letters; it is revealing of Frost’s mental state as his illness progressed.