ABSTRACT
The second chapter is concerned with the precursor of the Pioneer Health Centre, a much smaller family health centre which was established in Queen’s Road, Peckham, in 1925. It reconstructs the philanthropist motives of its original founders and financial backers, placing the PHC in the context of British traditions of liberal social reform, as well as concerns about eugenics and public health that were much debated since the Boer Wars. The original centre, it turns out, was one of many institutions looking for new ways to promote the “health of the nation”. The chapter also outlines the biographies of the main scientific protagonists of the centre, physicians George Scott Williamson (1884–1953) and Innes Hope Pearse (1889–1978), and presents the medical research they conducted during the late 1920s. It then describes the doctors’ initial findings as published in their 1931 book The Case for Action, thus reconstructing discoveries that motivated an intense period of fundraising after the closure of the first centre in 1929, which made possible the construction of a considerably larger second centre.
