Abstract
This creative-critical work draws on the archives of the Pioneer Health Centre, also known as the Peckham Experiment, held at the Wellcome Library. The Centre was established between the wars both to provide the conditions for, and to investigate, health rather than illness. The ways in which personal and group forms of vitality were conceptualized, valorized and put to work allowed poet and writer James Wilkes to think through the link between individual and societal relationships to leisure, work and health. However, the archive also holds many other strands of thinking – esoteric, biological, quasi-anarchist – and the choice of fiction as a form of writing provides a way of holding these dispersive, messy ingredients together – a way of working restlessly with restless materials.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Further Reading
Ginzburg, Carlo. Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive. Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2012.
Hall, Lesley A. The Archives of the Pioneer Health Centre, Peckham, in the Wellcome Library. Social History of Medicine 14, no. 3 (2001): 525–38.
Pester, Holly. Go to Reception and Ask for Sara in Red Felt Tip. London: Bookworks, 2015.
‘Pioneer Health Centre Peckham, with Papers of George Scott Williamson MD (1884–1953) and Innes Hope Pearse (1889–1978). Wellcome Library Archive, SA/PHC, n.d.
Smith, Ali. Artful. New York: Penguin, 2013.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, a link is provided to the Creative Commons license and any changes made are indicated.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the work’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if such material is not included in the work’s Creative Commons license and the respective action is not permitted by statutory regulation, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to duplicate, adapt or reproduce the material.
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wilkes, J. (2016). So Even the Tree has its Yolk. In: Callard, F., Staines, K., Wilkes, J. (eds) The Restless Compendium . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45264-7_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45264-7_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-45263-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-45264-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)