In his 1934 speech on venereal diseases delivered to the Iraqi Children’s Welfare Society, Iraqi doctor Fa’iq Shaker asserted, “…unless each soul is accounted for in a proper population census, I am unable to provide an accurate assessment on syphilis in Iraq.” In that same year, the British Public Health Advisor in Iraq, Dr, T. Barret Heggs published a strikingly different report. While noting that syphilis represented only 7% of diseases in Iraq for the year 1934, Dr. Heggs claimed that the disease was the most menacing pestilence in the country. Dr. Heggs’ qualitative data did not reflect his quantitative assertions especially since 1934 hosted an outbreak of Malaria that saw close to a quarter-million Iraqis hospitalized. The discrepancies of reports on venereal diseases reflect the contradictions of medicine and the colonial body. While Britain used venereal disease as a means of undermining local medical communities and simultaneously controlling public health and medical labor production, the local medical community used their professional platform to compete with colonial medical officials but also as an opportunity to suggest policies that they deemed meaningful and eradicate ‘social sins’. Examining how venereal diseases were understood, studied, and eradicated in Iraq during the Mandate and early Monarchic allows us a better understanding of the articulation of health and sickness in the colonial and post-colonial context. These articulations were diverse and carried conflicting meanings and outcomes. This paper showcases how venereal diseases facilitated an arena of confrontation between colonial medical personnel and the Iraqi medical community. These confrontations were rooted in debates surrounding the articulation and surveillance of Iraqi bodies and the regulation of their conduct and mobilities. In using venereal diseases as a marker to distinguish Iraqi bodies along with cultural, racial, and biological features, colonial medical personnel attempted to gain full control over Iraq’s health apparatus while simultaneously working to coopt its local medical community and regulate their professional mobilities. This paper uses medical discourse on venereal diseases to explore kaleidoscopic perspectives on the way in which venereal disease diagnosis, containment, eradication, and prevention policies underscore the confrontations that inevitably arose from colonial medicine and the bodies it aims to subjugate.