Sir Joseph Banks: eighteenth-century explorer, botanist, and entrepreneur

books by herself and her collaborators, G. Scott Williamson and Lucy Crocker, The case for action (1931), Biologists in search of material (1938), and The Peckham experiment (1943). Set up in the 1930s, the Peckham centre housed under one roof an enomous range of social activities for the community, from carpentry and swimming to ante-natal guidance, in the service of two deeper scientific goals. First, the "bionomic" desire amongst the founders to observe the social transactions of families within a wider milieu, seeing how inner impulses and outer opportunities dovetailed to form patterns of achievement activity. As Innes Pearse makes clear, all those families who joined the centre were being continually "watched" (its building was designed, like Bentham's panopticon, to ensure maximum visibility), and they had to agree to initial and regular "overhauls" and "screenings". Yet, the ideas behind the centre were far from "authoritarian" (much to the chagrin of orthodox contemporary social workers and administrators). As far as possible the centre was to be self-running, Scott Williamson and Innes Pearse believing that a "biological" order would establish itself, emergent out of the integrative action of the various social organisms making up not the aggregate but the "whole". Second, the belief that social medicine had taken a wrong turning in being preoccupied with disease, its cure and prevention, rather than with health as a real and positive entity. To the end of promoting health, the Peckham centre provided extensive consultations with families to instruct on topics such as pregnancy and breast feeding, regular health checks (including for couples contemplating marriage), a health farm and health holidays, and healthy environments (e.g. pioneering the use of hammock cots). Innes Pearse's recollections and vindication provoke many intriguing questions. One would like to know far more about the intellectual roots of the movement its precise blend of organicist bio-medical theory, left-wing politics (combining primitivist elements with Fabian tendencies), and philanthropy. The "ethnomethodology" of the encounters between South London working-class families and idealistic young doctors would be good to know about from the other side. And it would be fascinating to have the connexions and parallels brought out between Peckham and other contemporary movements to anthropologize and educate the lower classes in Darkest England: Mass Observation comes to mind. It is time an outsider explored the achievements and ambiguities of the Peckham experiment. Roy Porter Wellcome Institute