Epidemics
How a marble box taught epidemic theory
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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Reed-Frost theory, taught with a trough and colored marbles, made epidemics an academic research object without replacing fieldwork.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
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How a marble box taught epidemic theory
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
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
Key findings
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'.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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