Reading one's old texts is a journey into the past. The landscape was different then: the preoccupations were different, and so was the intellectual/social/political context that shaped these preoccupations. But, at the same time, there is usually a strong strand of continuity. The reasons for writing Social Support and Motherhood and for doing the research the book describes remain familiar. The book is what its subtitle says – the natural history of a research project, using ‘natural history’ to mean the systematic study of an organism in its environment. How and why is research conceived, planned, funded, executed, analysed, written up, published, and generally puzzled over? This ambition, to tell the story of how research is actually done, was one of the driving forces behind the writing of the book. (One of its reviewers, interestingly, suggested that title and subtitle should have been reversed (Pilcher 1997).) Not many researchers then (or now) were interested in revealing the often awkward fates of their well-laid plans: the sampling strategies that had no chance of succeeding; the strangely uncooperative ‘subjects’; the mislaid documents; the messy, inscrutable data. They prefer the sanitized versions, which are also the ones that tend to get published.

In holding to this fable of sanitary research we deprive ourselves of so many informative stories. The research described in Social Support and Motherhood was undoubtedly the most difficult (and therefore interesting) project I have ever been involved in during the half century and more I have worked in social research. It was difficult mainly because it defied easy description and containment within the framework of either medical or social science research, which was precisely what deepened its attraction for me. What I was intrigued to find out more about was the interface between the social and the biological: the ways in which how we live affects the behaviour of our bodies. The research and the book could, therefore, be seen as products of the sociology of health and illness and the sociology of embodiment, areas of work that were developing rapidly at the time (see, e.g., Shilling 2001; Williams and Bendelow 1999).