Disease lends itself to laboratory tales of heroism, which often mean stories of men and Europe. This dynamic has perhaps been especially true for the treatment of rabies, the fearsome ill that allegedly spawned tales of werewolves and vampires alike. This paper will indulge neither great-man history nor supernatural creature history. Instead, the paper will explore the social and environmental history of rabies in the late Ottoman Empire, a story situated in between common men, women, and creatures. Beginning in the 1890s the Ottoman state initiated a partnership with the Institut Pasteur and commenced to produce rabies vaccines. But curing the Well-Protected Domains of the malady spread by mad-dog bites was a matter of far more than production of medicine. Since for many years the only vaccines were available in Istanbul, treatment also involved the transportation at state expense of Ottoman citizens from far-flung portions of the Empire often via rail to the capital for month-long convalescences. A representative case took place in 1905 when a rabid dog bit a worker on the Hijaz Railway. While the Ottomans constructed the transportation network to ease the flow of pilgrims to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, treatment of the worker necessitated an imperial pilgrimage of sorts, sending the man from the iron of rails and grains of sand in the Hijaz to the Üsküdar Rabies hospital. Thus, the story of rabies entails a complicated set of relationships between humans, animals, and the built environment, all of them managed to varying degrees of success by the Ottoman state. This paper will illuminate these linkages by mining records kept of these cases by the Zaptiye (security forces) in two enormous defters at the Basbakanlik archive in Istanbul. Inquiring about the experiences of the humans and animals within this context, the paper will show how state and science interacted dialectically to reshape citizens’ relationships with their own bodies, the Ottoman state, and the environment more broadly. In doing so, the paper brings literature on the history of science and environmental history to bear on recent revisionist work on the late Ottoman Empire, firmly placing movement of people, ideas, and commodities at the center of the history of the Empire’s final years and the post-Ottoman polities of the region.