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Hans Sloane's A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1707–25) exemplifies the collecting that would make him famous, includes evidence of the medical practice responsible for some of his wealth and fame, and has served as a key text for scholars puzzling out the relationship between museums, healthcare, empire building, and racial slavery in the Caribbean. This essay examines the strange style that this text and other natural histories adopt, with their long, clunky, repetitive, plain, and sometimes downright boring descriptions of weather, plants, animals, and minerals—and, more alarmingly, human beings, their lives, their bodies, and their suffering. Sianne Ngai's concept of "stuplimity" can help us describe the effects of this tedium, which both awes and shocks with its length, repetitions, and taxonomies and leaves an open feeling akin to the sublime. I further argue that this feeling has embodied consequences that are clear from Sloane's medical case studies. I term this particularly medical aesthetic a "quotidian fever." The term itself refers to regularly occurring but untreatable fevers and embeds within it both the tedium and the possibilities of "the quotidian." The incurability of these fevers—both for patients and on the page—is not overcome, but rather remains incurable because of the imperial world-building enacted by Sloane and represented by his style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once the British transatlantic slave trade came under abolitionists' scrutiny in 1788, West Indian slaveholders had to consider alternative methods of obtaining well-needed laborers. This article examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. By focusing more on variances in work assignment and degrees of punishment rather than their absence, this article establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]