Smashed by the National Health

In our guest post today. Philip Conford gives us some insights into the reasons behind the Pioneer Health Centre, Peckham's demise. You can read his article “‘Smashed by the National Health’? A Closer Look at the Demise of the Pioneer Health Centre”, which appeared in Medical History 20:2 (2016), at https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2016.6

Philip writes: "In 2014, the medical journalist Ben Goldacre published a book called I Think You’ll Find It’s a Bit More Complicated Than That. This title struck me as an appropriate response to some comments made by former members of South London’s Pioneer Health Centre (PHC), about the reasons for the Centre’s closure in 1950. “The National Health smashed it,” said one of them, bitterly. But was the explanation for the Centre’s demise really that straightforward?

Material at the Wellcome Trust, the National Archives and the London Metropolitan Archives suggested not. For a start, the PHC had always struggled financially. A decade before the NHS was established, it was having to be bailed out by loans and donations because it was attracting insufficient numbers – payment of a subscription was necessary – to make it viable.

The reasons for this reluctance to be involved lay in the minds of all those families who chose not to belong to the Centre, and have therefore never been open to analysis, though Paul Rotha’s documentary film The Centre (1947) provides at least some idea of why people might have resisted what the PHC was offering.

Unable to raise sufficient money through membership, the PHC sought help from the government and the Medical Research Council (MRC). But the tone of George Scott Williamson, one of the Centre’s founders, in his correspondence with officialdom, and the fact that he was deeply antagonistic to the proposed National Health Service, would not have helped his cause.

Whereas the MRC had been sympathetic before the war, it was markedly less so after it. Techniques of medical statistics were rapidly advancing, and the PHC’s standards of record-keeping evidently did not meet the standards that the leading figures in this new field (for example Austin Bradford Hill) required. Again, Scott Williamson did not help his cause by emphasising that the PHC’s work was not an exercise in orthodox science. Harold Himsworth of the MRC was distinctly cool towards the Centre, which he seemed to regard as an irritant.

Nor was the cultural climate favourable to the PHC’s approach. A mood of what I have termed “chemical triumphalism” was abroad: the invention of sulphonamide drugs encouraged an aggressive faith in the power of industrial chemistry to defeat sickness and disease. The unorthodox and exploratory approach of the PHC would have seemed very uncertain in comparison with the dramatic, specific, results achieved by the pharmaceutical industry’s “silver bullets”.

The NHS was not directly responsible for the Pioneer Health Centre’s demise, although its medical approach to curing sickness rather than promoting health took health policy (or sickness policy, as its critics maintained) in a different direction from that explored at the Centre. Blaming the NHS fits in well with the current ideology of the “small state”, and one of my aims in writing this article was to suggest that the truth about the Pioneer Health Centre’s closure was indeed “a bit more complicated than that”."