How a marble box taught epidemic theory
Engelmann shows that the 1920s Reed-Frost epidemic theory, taught with a trough and colored marbles, made epidemics into an academic research object without replacing fieldwork.
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A box, a trough and marbles: How the Reed-Frost epidemic theory shaped epidemiological reasoning in the 20th century
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How a marble box taught epidemic theory
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The Reed-Frost epidemic theory was developed in the 1920s.
I focus on one particular example, developed in the 1920s and often referred to as the “Reed-Frost epidemic theory,” designed by the biostatistician Lowell Reed and the epidemiologists Wade Hampton Frost at Johns Hopkins University
What is the Reed-Frost epidemic theory?
changing ratio of susceptible and immune individuals in a population, the theory had much in common with earlier attempts of formalizing the dynamics of an
What they did
A historical reconstruction of the Reed-Frost epidemic theory at Johns Hopkins, reading its mathematical assumptions against earlier epidemic formalisms and against how Reed and Frost used a mechanical analogue of marbles in a trough to teach infectious-disease dynamics.
What they found
As epidemiology became an academic department, models supplied a general representation of interdependent contacts, susceptibility and immunity. Frost still insisted that a local measles outbreak could not be understood by abstraction alone. Models taught relations; they were not general laws of the 'epidemic streets'.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This is not a test of COVID models' accuracy, nor a new epidemic simulation. It does not claim that marbles caused later policy uses of modelling.
Key terms
- Reed-Frost epidemic theory
- 1920s Johns Hopkins formalisation of how the ratio of susceptible to immune people changes through an outbreak.
- Mechanical analogue
- Teaching model using an angled trough and colored marbles to visualise infectious-disease dynamics.
- Epidemiological reasoning
- Academic style that combines open-ended observation with mechanistic models of epidemics as research objects.
- Generative machines
- Models that do not only simulate outbreaks but help make epidemics into objects one can know and intervene in.
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Reed-Frost was designed at?
Common questions
Who designed the Reed-Frost theory?
Biostatistician Lowell Reed and epidemiologist Wade Hampton Frost at Johns Hopkins in the 1920s.
What was the teaching device?
An angled trough and a box of colored marbles that visualised infectious-disease dynamics.
Did Frost think models explained a local outbreak?
No: the local configuration demanded observation; models were not general laws of a school measles outbreak.
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