ABSTRACT
The fourth chapter jumps ahead several years, engaging in a close reading of the doctors’ bestselling 1943 book, The Peckham Experiment. This leap in time serves to contrast the initially stated aims of the centre with interpretations of its function that Pearse and Scott Williamson had arrived at by the early 1940s. By far surpassing their original objectives, Pearse and Scott Williamson were by now regarding the centre as a socio-biological research station that elucidated the biological laws of social self-organization. The chapter conveys that the medical directors were interpreting the PHC as a kind of social nutrient medium for individual growth and community development. In doing so, it points out how these processes were presented through a suggestive mix of statistical data, biological theorizing and personal observations on family life in the centre. The chapter then proceeds to explain how the doctors’ perception of the social interaction in the centre was shaped by scientific theories of the interwar period: Pearse and Scott Williamson were heavily influenced by new holistic approaches in medicine and the natural sciences in general, and more importantly, they viewed their project through the lens of evolutionary theory as put forward during the 1930s by “scientific humanists” like Julian Huxley, a prominent supporter of the centre.
