REALISING HEALTH

This magisterial study by a leading historian of the organic movement covers the history of the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham and its various offshoots in different parts of the world. Underlying the narrative is a tension between health and medicine represented by the Greek figures of Hygeia as the goddess of healthy living and Aesculapius as the God of healing and surgery; appropriately, they are respectively a woman and a man broadly representing intuitive and rational approaches, which the Network has always tried to balance. We were involved in a few discussions around follow-ups of Peckham in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and a number of our members feature in this book, notably Dr Peter Mansfield, whose work is not only covered in the text, but who also contributes an afterword. The author ruefully notes in his introduction that the book might better have been entitled Failing to Realise Health.

The first chapter sets the scene by examining the many and various definitions of health and their shortcomings – any definition needs to be situated in the larger context of environment, community, nutrition and exercise. Illness, sickness and disease are treated as the falling away from health, again with multiple perspectives seen broadly from rational and empiricist viewpoints, where the latter considers sickness and inflammation more along traditional Chinese medicine lines of a reactive curative process where one should not seek merely to suppress the symptoms. The Peckham Experiment as the physical centre ran from 1926 to 1950, with a hiatus during the War. The overall approach was one of holistic social hygiene and the basic unit was the family, and the author provides some interesting reflections on how the Centre reflected a contemporary eugenicist flavour emphasising the importance of environment rather than heredity.

After the war came a 'chemical triumphalism' where technology was touted as the answer to post-war problems. This manifested itself in chemistry and food production and chemistry in medicine, a process facilitated by establishment networks and connections in a rising tide of scientific self-assertion that is currently in full view as health technocracy. It is evident both from the history of the Peckham Centre and the many other offshoots discussed that hopes are raised and dashed through a combination of shortage of funding, personality issues and establishment resistance represented by the pharmaceutical domination of the whole field of medicine reflecting their own highly competitive business model. A chapter is devoted to the work of Peter Mansfield, who was and is acutely aware of the contrasting views on primary care between 'the technical, instrumentalist, interventionist approach' that essentially has to do with sickness, not health, and the 'personal, expressive, non-interventionist' holistic approach (pp. 225-6). The most successful experiment was by Halley Harwin Stott in South Africa, and my friend Margaret Hannah's work in Scotland is also described, along with many other interesting grassroots initiatives, bringing the narrative right up-to-date – we featured some of these in our last conference collaboration with their British Holistic Medical Association.

One chapter is devoted to the gathering critique of the pharmaceutical industry, including the work of SMN Member Brian Inglis, Vernon Coleman (still active in his 80s in the current crisis) Rene Dubos, RD Laing and Ivan Illich. The final chapter analyses obstacles to holistic health in terms of practical problems, vested interests and the philosophical assumptions of holistic and reductionist approaches. This last area is culturally the most critical, where medicine is invested with prestige and positive health correspondingly with only marginal status. Key industries also include food production as well as chemicals and pharmaceuticals, many of which are linked and become ever more concentrated, also in terms of lobby power. Industry funds Quackbusters to attack natural medicine and dismantle university courses on complementary medicine. It also funds campaigns for the 'public understanding of science' and against so-called health fraud to bolster mainstream narratives and correspondingly undermine any dissenting views. AI algorithms now render this censorship process more or less instantaneous.

Finally, it was good to see the incorporation of Iain McGilchrist's work on the two hemispheres applied to the contrast between Hygeia and Aesculapius representing the right and left hemispheres respectively. We need a profound realisation as a culture of the imbalanced situation in which we now find ourselves, trapped in convergent and narrowly-focused left hemisphere systems that aggressively challenge any opposition – again the current Covid crisis provides a textbook example as we are manipulated through fear into authoritarian compliance. In his afterword, Peter identifies top-down economic globalisation as the chief enemy of health, which must prosper locally and in community settings that encourage initiative and self-reliance. Here the book meshes with the work of Vandana Shiva reviewed below where the holistic approach advocated by early pioneers Sir Albert Howard and Sir Robert McCarrison to agriculture and nutrition respectively is in fact vital to our future flourishing and survival. This book will be a valuable point of reference for many years to come.