This episode of the IsisCB Pandemics series features various contributors who wrote and reviewed bibliographic essays surveying the literature about concepts fundamental to our understanding of pandemic and epidemic diseases. Dora Vargha, Lukas Engelmann, and Jacob Steere-Williams offer their perspectives on the significance of these topics discussing how historians can move away from a model of biography of disease and towards a better understanding of the co-occurrence of disease epidemics with epidemics of social phenomena.