Abstract
The circulation of medical knowledge about fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth, both in the Atlantic world and on plantations in the Americas, is reflected in plantation management manuals written by British doctors who lived and worked in the Caribbean. Although midwives presided over most births on plantations during the age of abolition, doctors became increasingly concerned with solving the problem of infertility. Plantation doctors elaborated theories, grounded in European medical traditions, about the delivery of Afro-Caribbean children and the causes of Afro-Caribbean infertility. Sexual promiscuity and consequent venereal disease figured large among these supposed causes. The story of Matthew Lewis, who grew up in England and traveled to Jamaica for the first time as an adult in order to reform management practices on two plantations inherited from his father, provides a case study in the deployment of new plantation management practices designed to promote reproduction and recommended by British doctors.
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