In the wake of a global pandemic, our understanding of infectious disease is often reduced to familiar narratives--humans battling microbes or lone scientists saving the day. This book challenges that perspective by offering a fresh, interdisciplinary examination of the relationships that connect people, animals, microbes, and the environments they inhabit. Bringing together fourteen leading international experts from microbiology, medical history, and the humanities, it explores how infectious disease has been shaped by ecological change as well as by digital technologies and an increasingly interconnected world. Rather than presenting simplified accounts, the contributors place modern microbiology and medicine within the wider cultural and political transformations of the late twentieth century. They trace the emergence of ideas such as risk and ecology in relation to postindustrial and reflexive modernity, showing how these frameworks have reshaped thinking about infectious disease. The result is a new way of understanding microbes--not simply as enemies, but as participants in the historical processes that have linked medicine, human societies, and the natural world.