Abstract
In this essay, we argue that the concept of reservoir, as it has been deployed across various scientific and popular writing, articulates a distinctive logic of historical time. Rather than offer an intellectual history of the concept of reservoir, we focus specifically on the entailments of this concept for the ways in which we think and write about disease and epidemics. We argue that the concept of reservoir entails a particular bio-logic of history. That is, the reservoir is a complex biological entity that inflects historical accounts through a distinctive logic of change. This essay represents our effort to elucidate that logic.