In this introductory chapter, I set the scene for the book by explaining the magnitude and political salience of Zimbabwe’s 2008–09 cholera outbreak. I then lay out my approach to studying the political life of the epidemic by situating the book in the relevant social science scholarship to provide academic context, identify important gaps in the literature and set some of the key parameters of the work. After reviewing the literature, I develop a theoretical framework – that I call ‘one disease, many crises’ – which forms the backdrop to the historical and empirical chapters that follow. From here, in the methodology section, I detail the specific methods I used to conduct this study. I then lay out the core argument of the thesis in brief and I stress the novel contributions that this study makes to academe. In the penultimate section, I outline the anatomy of the thesis by giving a summary of each of its constituent chapters and stating how they fit into the larger whole.