This paper examines the emergence of state-led anti-syphilis campaigns in Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s and explores how the state created a new medical and moral order surrounding its citizens’ sexualities. Amid the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, Turkey’s fledgling Ministry of Public Health and Social Services sought to deal with the increasing prevalence of syphilis throughout its rural communities as connected with the return of soldiers from World War I. In this context of public health, matters of sex, reproduction, and sexual health were subject to state intervention and control and in ways that included but also transcended concerns over morality. Implementing this transition, the state proceeded carefully to ensure that its efforts to govern the sexual lives of its citizens did not contradict with societal mores or values. Making syphilis a subject for state regulation, moral pronouncements regarding the disease were reframed, represented, and dispersed as lessons in public health. In my paper, utilizing information from official and unofficial primary sources, I analyze this transformation as part of a broader process of medicalization and state expansion that reshaped understandings of sexuality, morality, and reproduction during the socio-political transitions from a religious empire to a nominally secular nation-state. First, my research begins with an examination of the data collected and submitted to the state by its provincial health directors. Gathered from 1923 onward, this data and their monthly reports described in colorful detail the physical, human, and epidemiological landscapes of Turkey’s provinces. Second, I examine the legislative frameworks, such as the 1934 Public Health Law, by which the state enacted institutional controls over syphilis – and society. Third, I explore how the state sought to engage with its citizenry by analyzing posters, brochures, and medical booklets that were produced by the Ministry of Public Health in 1920s and 1930s. Not only revealing how the republic endeavored to educate the public, this public health and safety literature illustrates the scope and discourse of early campaigns against syphilis. Fourth, I deal with how the state prioritized policies affecting prostitution and subjected prostitutes and brothels to weekly examinations, inspections, and taxes. Finally, I evaluate how these campaigns helped contribute to a political culture in Turkey geared towards both the gathering, ordering, and assessing data on the livelihoods, activities, cultures, and bodies of its citizens and the obligations compelling doctors to report disease incidence, treatment, and failure to comply with treatment.