Throughout my career in epidemiology, which has spanned much of the twentieth century, I often heard references to Wade Hampton Frost as the one who did the most to bring epidemiology into the ranks of scientific disciplines. And yet, when I recently looked through the medley of epidemiology textbooks in my library, I found his name mentioned in only about half of them, and then usually in connection with his paper on cohort analysis. There was one notable exception. John R. Paul, in his book, Clinical Epidemiology, said:

Few would disagree with Paul’s assessment of Frost’s work, a fact that makes the scant attention paid to Frost by the teachers of epidemiology in their textbooks puzzling. It cannot be that his name was forgotten; half of the texts did refer to one of his papers. Furthermore, in 1972 the Epidemiology Section of the American Public Health Association initiated a series of Wade Hampton Frost lectures at its annual meetings; these were continued for more than two decades, although, unfortunately, relatively few were published.

Several of the earlier lectures emphasized the different facets of epidemiology to which Frost had contributed. In the first lecture, Abraham Lilienfeld reviewed the progressive spread of epidemiologic methods to the study of chronic noninfectious diseases, a trend started by Frost. John Fox noted Frost’s pioneering use of the family as a unit for epidemiologic study.