This paper explores the construction of bubonic plague as a specific illness during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by comparing contemporary accounts of two episodes of mass mortality, in Marseilles and Aleppo (present-day Syria). The hypothesis of external disease agents to be classed together like birds or fish bore with it a corollary: the generic human body. Because people were taxonomically 'equal,' recognizably distinct illnesses could be produced in any individual notwithstanding his or her idiosyncratic balance of humors. These linked ideas were hotly debated between those who promoted contagionist ideas and those (both in Europe and the Levant) who rejected them. The official rationale for European quarantines was an identification of Middle Eastern cities with the bubonic plague, the inevitable outcome of particular beliefs and behaviors. However, examination of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources suggests instead that on both sides of the Mediterranean, divergent attitudes toward quarantine were motivated by a struggle for power in the international marketplace and political arena. Diagnoses of 'bubonic plague' in this period were an inversion of contemporary arguments for equality within European nation-states. Individuals and communities that showed "marks of contagion" on their physical or social bodies were denied the protection of rights increasingly thought to accrue to all states and human beings equally. The quarantine institutions that diagnosed and claimed to control plague thus provided boundaries for human rights on the one hand, and the 'family of nations' on the other. Descriptions of plague by laypersons and medical literati, including both 'contagionists' like Jean-Baptiste Bertrand and 'localists' like Salih bin Nasrallah Ibn Sallum and Francois Chicoyneau, make clear that all parties, both professional and lay, depended on common theoretical principles outlined in Graeco-Arabic medical and natural historical sources. The residents of Europe and Ottoman Syria differed not in their medical knowledge but rather in administrative systems that called familiar diseases of development by different names. Apparent differential incidence of plague, I suggest in conclusion, may be an illusion of our documentary sources, as common bodily signs appearing on individuals in widely dispersed locations were associated with each other by a complex documentary chain.