The epidemiologic tradition: the Wade Hampton Frost Lecture.

THE WADE HAMPTON FROST LECTURE honors the memory of a career officer in the U.S. Public Health Service who, when the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health was established in 1919, was detailed by the Surgeon General to be resident lecturer, then professor of epidemiology, and subsequently head of the Departments of Epidemiology and Public Health Administration. The man chosen to develop the first university department of epidemiology represented, therefore, in his background as well as his academic responsibilities, the union of theory and practice which is a major strand in the epidemiologic tradition. Indeed, as Maxcy points out in his introduction to Frost's papers (1), "Whatever contribution he made to the improvement of the methods of epidemiology, he was