The First World War engendered a multiplicity of anxieties about sex and sexuality during and after the Entente’s occupation of Istanbul. According to one doctor named Mehmet Ali (Kasim) writing in 1924 on the moral disruption brought about by the war, “Today, the danger to which youths are exposed is graver than the gunfire caught by soldiers.” Indeed, doctors were on the front lines of what many male observers believed to be a veritable moral crisis in the fledgling Turkish Republic. Bestowing upon themselves the role of scientific leaders of the new Turkey, doctors seized upon postwar unease surrounding the nation’s perceived moral wantonness to ensconce themselves in high level decision-making processes about sex and sexuality and how the nation could recover from defeat. As another doctor named Muhib Nureddin explained, it was insufficient for doctors to “struggle” in hospitals and examination rooms; it was incumbent upon them to take on “a wider, more public” role in public health, specifically as it related to sexual health. In this paper, I analyze the works of Dr. Kasim and others, writing about a variety of ‘symptoms’ of the postwar ‘moral sickness’ described by Turkish observers. These symptoms included soliciting prostitution, syphilis, and masturbation. I argue that doctors’ desire for a wider role in public affairs dovetailed with the increasing level of surveillance and emphasis on ossifying gender roles that state actors considered necessary to revitalize a nation ravaged by nearly a decade of continuous war. Dr. Nureddin explained the problem in stark terms: an “an impure generation” emerged out of World War I, for whom “the fatherland (vatan), the nation (millet) are among the words he does not comprehend.” As a member of the Istanbul Police Ministry named Mustafa Galip further explained, women who committed “disgusting acts” such as prostituting themselves were “essentially diseased,” ensconcing perceived sexual deviancy as a medical problem. In addition to calling for further police surveillance of such women (and men), Galip redoubled doctors’ calls for a wider role for medical authorities to scrutinize both male and female bodies and sexual habits. This scrutinization, I argue, was a key site upon which Turkish efforts to chart out the path for the new nation-state’s viability occurred.