The Peckham Experiment by Michael Young

Review of ‘The Peckham Experiment’, republished 1985.

The founder-Chairman of the College of Health, Michael Young, here acknowledges that his own vision for the College was anticipated in the 1930s by the Peckham Health Centre.

When Marianne Rigge and I founded the College of Health our chief hope was that it could help to promote positive health. We knew this could only be done in a more vigorous society in which people care more fully for each other.

The National Health Service is primarily a National Disease Service. But it can still live up to its name, and, if it does, it could be a growing-point for the transformation of society.

In this connection there are many lessons to be learned from the Peckham Health Centre. These are now brought home by the timely republication, to coincide in 1985 with the 50^th anniversary of the opening of the Peckham Health Centre in South London, of a book first published in 1943. (The Peckham Experiment – a study of the living structure of society, by Innes H. Pearse and Lucy H. Crocker, Scottish Academic Press, 1985, £5.00).

What was the Centre? It was a club, of a most unusual kind, open not to individuals but to families living in Peckham. Families joined, not because their members were ill – there were no facilities for treatment – but because they were healthy, or thought themselves so. The doctors on the staff were there to observe people and to conduct an annual medical overhaul.

The members had their own health records: they were encouraged to understand them and improve their own ratings year by year. The records themselves were an incentive to stay well, and to stay more well from one year’s end to another. Medical records should surely be used in the same way again.

Dr Scott Williamson, the enthusiast who founded the Centre, discovered that very many people who thought themselves healthy were not so at all. Out of 3,911 individuals in member-families who were examined in the annual overhaul, 3,553 (or over 90 per cent) were found to have something wrong with them, ranging from minor troubles like bad teeth, plantar warts and bunions to serious disorders like cancer, emphysema, heart conditions and diabetes. The latter were sent off to ordinary doctors for treatment.

One of the causes was poor nutrition. A third of the men and boys and over half the women and girls were, for example, suffering from iron deficiency.

Williamson had been impressed by the work of Sir Robert McCarrison in India. McCarrison reared rats on the typical British working-class diet of the time, with lots of white bread, margarine and sweet tea. The rats grew up stunted, sickly and quarrelsome, and died early.

The first step towards better health was, therefore, to improve nutrition. Information about how to do this, even on limited incomes, was freely available in the Centre, and the members paid attention.

To get better supplies Williamson and the members set up a Home Farm in Bromley, to supply better milk, and fruit and vegetables compost-grown. Food from the farm was sold to pregnant mothers at the Centre at no more than the prevailing local prices.

The second step was to provide the opportunity for exercise in the indoor swimming pool around which the Centre was built, in the gymnasium and in the other sports clubs.

The third step was to bring together physically a large number of services. In today’s terms, Peckham housed all in one place an antenatal and child welfare clinic, family planning centre, a nursery school, youth club, sports centre, adult education institute, CAB, marriage advisory council and child guidance clinic.

The fourth step was to give the members (some of whom had been socially isolated before) the chance to meet others in a good atmosphere in the Centre’s cafe, to make friends, to decide on their own activities and to organise their own groups.

People were left to their own devices – even the children. They were listless when adults arranged everything for them and came to life when they were allowed to take over themselves and draw up their own programmes.

Peckham was as much (or more) a social experiment as it was a medical experiment. Its greatest lesson was that the social was necessary to the medical. Health is far from as good as it could be, partly because of poverty and unemployment. The Black Report in 1980 on inequalities in health showed that. Health is also deficient because people’s style of life is wrong.

Peckham showed that people could change their lives, and for the better. The newest disease to afflict mankind, AIDS, has also shown the link between life style and disease with almost unique clarity. But the way people live does not need to be changed just to reduce the risk of AIDS. There is much more at stake even than that.

This article was first printed in Self Health in 1985.