The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum, a medical historian at the City University of London (UK), focuses on large-scale outbreaks since 1900. The author uses 9 examples to shine a light on epidemiological blind spots to avoid in future investigations. For example, he suggests that the initial lackluster response to the 1918 influenza pandemic can be attributed in part to false confidence in Richard Pfeiffer’s 1892 discovery of Bacillus influenzae, now known as Haemophilus influenzae. We later learned that H. influenzae occasionally is found in persons with influenza but was not the cause of the pandemic