The British Mandate government in Iraq established new quarantine and medical procedures along Iraq’s borders. The creation of such border posts that carried a dual function of border protection and health inspection shows what the British perceived as external threats and from where. One responsibility of the medical officers at these border posts was the inspection of corpses entering Iraq by both land and sea for burial in Shi’i holy cities like Najaf and Karbala. With this medical-legal border, health posts inspecting arriving corpses became sites of taxation, permits, and arrests. The heightened bureaucratization of such sites also necessitated agents trained to inspect corpses, including Iraqi midwives responsible for female corpses. Using materials from the British India Office Archive and the Iraqi National Archives, I argue that corpse traffic to Iraq did not end during the British period, but rather the British created a new administrative apparatus to tax, record, and medicalize the incoming bodies. This work seeks to question how governments and subjects negotiate power within an imperial context using the dead as a vector of analysis. The paper also focuses on the training of these midwives to inspect the dead as opposed to maternity care.