This paper examines the discourse of the Ottoman elite as well as the official policies regarding public hygiene in ?stanbul in the Abdülhamid II period (1876-1909). Several examples of how the policies were manifested in everyday life are included in the analysis. The combined evidence makes two interrelated suggestions. First is a much stronger attempt of the political power to penetrate into the social life through innovative medical organizations and regulations. As a result of the intersection of the various lines of development such as the rise of cholera epidemic in the early 1890s, the emergence of bacteriology, the problem of control of the city population’s becoming much more urgent because of the extreme crowding, and the long term evolution of the modern mechanisms of governing throughout the nineteenth century, the regulation of the social environment in terms of hygiene, especially that of the domestic space, became one of the foremost issues on the agenda of the political power. Second is that the main objects of this policy of control over urban population were the poor who were perceived as a threat to the social body, both in terms of decreasing its capacity, and constituting a danger for the more privileged parts of it, as they, and their domestic space, were perceived as potential sources of disease. When looked at from a broader perspective, the public hygiene measures, along and in connection with the coercive measures and welfare strategy formed another constituent of the politics of the social control of the poor in this period.