The Reed-Frost Model: Epidemic Complexity and Analytical Epidemiology

• In Event: Modeling Health Futures: Practices of Assuming, Anticipating, and Forecasting - I

Abstract

This paper aims to reconstruct the historical impact of the Reed-Frost Model, also known as the Reed-Frost epidemic theory. Perhaps one of the most pervasive models in epidemiology until today, it is one of the simplest stochastic models to describe the evolution of an infection within a population over time. Developed in the 1920s at Johns Hopkins University, it would eventually became the most disruptive innovation in the discipline’s history. The Reed-Frost epidemic theory foreshadowed the radical transformation of epidemiology from a descriptive and narrative science to one primarily concerned with analytical methods.
In my paper I will look at some of the epistemological conditions that led to the invention and successful dissemination of the Reed-Frost Model. The steady growth of statistical and experimental studies on the dynamics of infections since the beginning of the twentieth century had contributed to a devastatingly complex picture of epidemics (Mendelsohn 1998, Amsterdamska 2004). The collaboration of Wade Hampton Frost and Lowell Reed merged the practice of a former public health officer (Frost) with the analytical tools of vital statistics (Reed). The resulting model was supposed to describe general laws of an idealised epidemic. Rather than to resolve the burden of complexity in the field, it was designed to redefine the discipline’s research object as a precise theoretical entity. This shift of focus, I argue, enabled epidemiology to move substantially beyond observation and description of epidemic complexity and uncertainty. Instead, the popular model valorised mathematical modelling as a practice of epidemiological forecasting and prediction.

Author

• Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh