In 1867, after a hiatus of more than thirty years, plague appeared among tribal communities close to the holy city of Karbala in Ottoman Iraq and remained in Baghdad province episodically until 1881. Causing great alarm in Europe that had catalogued the plague as an eradicated scourge of the uncivilized past, the Ottomans were hard-pressed to contain the disease. Multiple committees of physicians and inspectors were dispatched by the governor of Baghdad, as well as the imperial center to locate, investigate and report on the initial outbreak in 1867 as well as the later episodes. The medical reports produced in the process and preserved in the Ottoman archives, in which the physicians engage, and sometimes medically inspect, tribal communities, provide a generative resource to study how medical information was exchanged and translated between the ‘professionals’ and local groups, and later codified and reported to the center. Beyond exhibiting profound understanding of the nature of the plague, I argue that the reports demonstrate the agency of local groups to craft and employ narratives for their own interest, leading to major disagreement between several physicians on whether the outbreak was indeed one of plague. Once international medical opinion established the outbreak as such, the original reports on it got made into many other things. Together with future inspection reports, they made up narratives of ‘plague in Baghdad/Mesopotamia’ in medical journals such as the Lancet, which declared this ‘unquestionably the most important addition to our knowledge of plague’ as well as lengthy reports in British Indian and various other medical journals. They also constituted the bulk of an official report titled ‘Modern History and Recent Progress of Levantine Plague’ that was presented to the UK Parliament in 1879. Through analysis of the life-journey of reporting on plague in Ottoman Iraq, this paper uncovers the multi-faceted nature of knowledge production on disease that was mired in the politics of translation, expertise and circulation. Engaging with recent scholarship on epidemiological orientalism, it aims to locate this episode, which coincided with sporadic outbreaks of plague in Libya and Yemen, as part of the increasing effort in the nineteenth-century to redefine the plague as a disease with origins in the Middle East.