Unnatural Love: The Pathology of Desire during the late Ottoman Period At the turn of the twentieth century, the questions of healthy marriage and conjugal love were at the center of public debates in the Ottoman society as reflected in mainstream newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets. Many works on the issue of love were penned by physicians and psychiatrists who sought to promote a particular understandings of love and desire. In this medicalized context, love and desire were considered significant emotional elements of the conjugal equation in a healthy, heteronormative marriage. They cast love and desire as components of procreation, which was seen as the natural and necessary function of marriage. As such, love and desire that did not further procreation fell into the category of “unnatural (gayrıtabii),” leading to disorders such as kara sevda (melancholia), same-sex desire, masturbation, masochism, and so forth. By putting Western European medical and psychiatric trends in dialogue with the existing sex culture, Ottoman physicians and psychiatrists played an important role in the making of new medical semantics, propagating their diagnosis of unnatural love among a middle class readership. This paper examines of the emergence of pathologies of unnatural love by drawing on fundamental Ottoman medical and psychiatric writings as well as everyday life cases of “unnatural love,” such as same-sex desire and kara sevda (melancholia) as reflected in the archival record. In doing so, this paper will explore the circulation of these medical/psychiatric concepts in a broader sociological context and how they came to bare on the emotional experience of Ottoman citizens.