Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Follow Jeffrey on X (formerly Twitter): @JKAronson.
BMJ. 2024 Mar 1;384:q545. doi: 10.1136/bmj.q545.
The Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, also known as the Peckham Centre, running what became known at the Peckham Experiment, was founded in 1926 by two doctors, Innes Pearse (1889-1978) and her colleague George Scott Williamson (1884-1953). It closed down in 1929 and reopened in 1935 in new purpose-built premises. Families paid a shilling a week for membership, which gave them free medical consultations of various sorts and access to a wide variety of recreations, but no medical treatment. The purpose was to observe how their health progressed and to discover what factors were involved in good health and wellbeing. After closing down again during World War II the centre reopened, but was forced to close again in 1950, this time for good, because of lack of funds, due to a complex range of factors. In a 1938 publication, the founders stressed that health and wellbeing were not synonymous; health, they wrote, operates with a cumulative deposit account and wellbeing on a diminishing current account. Two blue plaques commemorate the Pioneer Health Centre: an English Heritage blue plaque at 142 Queen's Road, Peckham, London SE15, the site of the centre's original building, and a plaque put up by the London Borough of Southwark at the site of the second building, now converted to a block of flats, and situated round the corner from the Queen's Road premises, in Frobisher Place, St Mary's Road, Peckham.
佩卡姆先锋健康中心（又称佩卡姆中心）由两位医生因尼斯·皮尔斯（Innes Pearse，1889-1978 年）和她的同事乔治·斯科特·威廉姆森（George Scott Williamson，1884-1953 年）于 1926 年创立，运行了一个后来被称为“佩卡姆实验”的项目。该中心于 1929 年关闭，1935 年在新的专门建造的场所重新开放。每个家庭每周只需支付一先令的会费，就可以获得各种免费的医疗咨询和各种各样的娱乐活动，但不包括医疗服务。其目的是观察他们的健康状况如何，并发现哪些因素与健康和幸福有关。该中心在第二次世界大战期间再次关闭，1945 年重新开放，但由于资金短缺，于 1950 年永久关闭，原因是涉及一系列复杂因素。在 1938 年的一份出版物中，创始人强调健康和幸福并非同义词；他们写道，健康是通过累积存款账户运作，而幸福则是通过不断减少的当前账户运作。先锋健康中心有两块匾额纪念：一块是位于伦敦 SE15 区皇后路 142 号的英国遗产匾额，这是该中心原始建筑的所在地；另一块匾额是由伦敦南华克区设立的，位于第二个建筑所在地，现在已改建成公寓楼，位于皇后路旧址附近的圣玛丽路福比舍广场转角处。
