There's a very old Benjamin book, S-Matrix Theory of Strong Interactions, by Geoffrey Chew(1961), which in addition to discussing singularities and absorptive parts of diagrams, reprints two key papers on the subject -- Cutkosky's paper on singularities and Landau's paper on vertex analytic properties. Availability? See Amazon,...
The basic idea comes from the notion of pairs of Hilbert Transforms -- Dispersion relations if you will. Check out the Kramers-Kronig expression for dialectric constants, basically a Hilbert transform. An overly simplified approach is to note that
1/(X + ie) = - i delta(x) +P(1/x)
where P indicates the principal part, which is the basis for Hilbert Transforms.
More recent discussions can be found in Chap. 10 of Weinberg's QFT, and F. Gross's Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Field Theory.
This stuff was big in the 1960s, part of the "anti-field theory" approach of Chew and the S-Matrix gang. But Gell-Man and his quarks,symmetries, and the field theory approaches won the day.
Sorry to be so sloppy, but it's been a while since I've thought about absorptive parts and the like.
Regards,
Reilly Atkinson