This paper explores approaches to malaria during the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire and later in Republican Turkey. Because disease management entails the control of people and their lived environments, solutions to malaria affected Ottoman subjects directly and were inextricable from other political and economic concerns. As treatments for malaria shifted their focus from bad air to bad mosquitoes to bad peasants, Ottoman and Turkish citizens were thrust into the role of infantry in an ostensive battle between nature and nation. For most of the Ottoman period, malaria was understood through its symptoms, namely recurring fevers during the late summer and fall months in warm, wet regions. This ailment was attributed to the bad air or climate of humid areas such as swamps. The most common response was avoidance of such geographies during those months, resulting in the emergence of seasonal migration among pastoral and urban populations alike. However, during the nineteenth century, increased pressure to settle seasonally migratory pastoralist communities identified as a?air meant that this solution was no longer tolerable from a state perspective. The focus of this paper is on efforts to make malarial regions more habitable through drainage efforts that arise in the public works records of the Ottoman archives. Cultivation of these lands was to make them more productive, enrich the empire, and provide space for the settlement of nomads and immigrants fleeing the Russian sphere. Within the understandings of disease from the period, these efforts were cast as cleansing of polluted environments through drainage and planting healthful vegetation such as eucalyptus. However, economic and political objectives were prioritized over health, and I argue that the expansion of frontier-type settlement through the cultivation of new lands by resettled populations resulted in the creation of malaria issues as opposed to their elimination, which in turn undermined many aspects of Tanzimat-era government agendas. Yet, this is not to say that Ottoman medical professionals and statesmen were not concerned with public health. This paper also considers measures taken towards fighting malaria, particularly after scientific advances marked the malaria parasite and its vector the anopheles mosquito as the central culprits, leading to medical and mosquito-focused approaches. During this period as in the past, the improper practices of rural folks and their ecological habits remained a central target. In this way, as scientific approaches to malaria began to change, the constant of the supremacy of scientific knowledge was maintained.