In this paper, I trace the emergence of biopolitics in the first three decades of the Turkish Republic (1920s to 1950s) through an analysis of the mental hygiene and IQ (intelligence quotient) discourse. I seek to demonstrate how these two discourses permeated the social and educational reforms of the nascent Republic, constructing new categories and scientific objects while demarcating new boarders for sociality, subjectivity, and citizenship. While these two discourses appeared in two separate scientific fields, psychiatry and pedagogy respectively, they coalesced in their objectification of the mind and the intellect as a part of the broader population question (nüfus meselesi). The former aimed at formulating principles for organizing the mind and disciplining the intellect as a precursor to a well-organized conduct while the latter sought to apply the quasi-scientific principles drawn from the studies done on human brain in school settings, in classification of school children, and organization of educational experience at large. The overall purpose was to fabricate healthier citizens. I begin with describing the establishment of Türkiye Hijyen Mental Cemiyeti (Mental hygiene Society) by the leading psychiatrist Fahreddin Kerim Gökay, and the activities of the Institute of Pedagogy of Istanbul University. My concern is how the bio-medical and psychosocial policies, practices and discourses were made possible through a combination of conditions being present simultaneously, particularly those pertaining to the economic, social and cultural anxieties of the new Republic. These were: the fear of population decline, and the preoccupations with economic productivity of the body that blended into the fears of ethnic degeneration, and social diseases and pathologies of all sort (prostitutes, alcoholics, syphilitics, the feebleminded etc.). I use a wide range of archival data to construct the narrative including: visual materials, brochures and similar propaganda pamphlets produced and distributed by the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (now Ministry of Health) and the Ministry of National Education, scientific and quasi-scientific publications produced by the Department of Medicine, Psychiatry, and Pedagogy of Istanbul University on mental and social hygiene, biographies and autobiographies of the scientists and political actors in the designated time period, and popular and scientific journals. Methodologically grounded in what is called history of present, the analysis in this paper aims bring into view a way of thinking about the social and individual body as “invented” through multiple different historical practices.