Besim Omer (1862-1940), a leading Ottoman medical thinker wrote a seminal article on plague for the widely-read journal Servet-i Funun in May 1898. Omer, who was trained both in France and at Istanbul's Military Medical School (Mekteb-i Tibbiye-i Sahane), penned the most influential Ottoman public response to Alexander Yersin's discovery of the bubonic plague in 1894. While Omer accepted Yersin's biological explanation of the bubonic plague as a bacillus transmitted by rats and fleas to its human victims, Omer placed the history of the plague within an Ottoman historical context. His work should therefore be viewed not just by empirical scientific standards but also by analyzing to what extent geopolitical and social factors influenced his perception of the disease. Omer, like many of his fellow Ottoman medical reformers believed that his government's participation in international quarantine system was supported by Islamic principles which called for preventative measures against the epidemic disease. Omer applauded earlier Ottoman successes in this regard-such as the Ottoman establishment of a maritime quarantine in 1838 and its membership in the international sanitary board from 1842 onwards. Yet, Omer also highlighted a critical change in the Ottoman perception of the plague. Whereas most earlier Ottoman writers avoided discussing whether the Ottomans were a focus of the disease, Omer posited that plague generally spread to the empire from foreign lands. This presentation will argue that Omer's argument was based on the geopolitical realities of the time. As the proceedings of the International Sanitary Conferences and other Western language sources show, many foreign medical authorities claimed that colonized countries such as Egypt and India were previously focuses of the plague. They often implied that only enlightened Western public health policies could prevent the unsanitary conditions in which the infected rats and fleas flourished. Omer's response that the Ottomans were able to independently implement their own sanitary measures was an important ideological justification for maintaining the Empire's sovereignty.