My paper examines the references to nerves and the nervous system in the works of Ottoman-Turkish author Halid Ziya Usakligil (1866-1945), and how these references and associated imagery impacted public perception at the time. In many cases, it was the female characters in Usakligil’s works that were stricken by nervous illnesses effectively marginalizing woman as the weaker sex. Aside from this simplistic engendering of nerves, I dig deeper into Usakligil’s works to determine whether diseases of the nervous system disproportionately impacted different socioeconomic classes at that time. My paper also focuses on the metaphors Usakligil draws on to construct the images of nerves. In his novels, nerves often attack people, poison them and claim lives. His emphasis on nerves and the potential threats they pose are striking. I argue that Usakligil borrows from the narratives of contagious diseases while medicalizing and analogizing nerves. This observation inspired me to raise the following questions: Where does this language come from? In other words, what might have motivated Usakligil to rely on the language of contagion? Were nervous illnesses deemed contagious at the turn of the twentieth century in the Ottoman Empire? Does Usakligil refer to an external reality when he chooses to compare nerves to contagious diseases? Last but not least, what kind of fictional possibilities might have Usakligil harnessed through the language of contagion? To be able to answer these questions, I focus on Usakligil’s early novels often clustered as his Izmir novels: Nemide (1889), Sefile (1887), Bir Ölünün Defteri (1889), Ferdi ve Surekâsi (1894). My paper, standing at the intersection of medicine and literature, seeks to contribute to the field of Medical Humanities from a non-Western perspective.