W. H. R. Rivers

William Halse Rivers Rivers (12 March 1864 – 4 June 1922) was an English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist known for treatment of First World War officers suffering shell shock. Rivers' most famous patient was the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, with whom he remained close friends until his own sudden death.

During the early years of the 20th century, Rivers developed new lines of psychological research. He was the first to use a double-blind procedure in investigating physical and psychological effects of consumption of tea, coffee, alcohol and drugs. For a time he directed centres for psychological studies at two colleges, and he was made a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He also participated in the Torres Strait Islands expedition of 1898, the basis for his seminal work on kinship in anthropology.

Family background

W. H. R. Rivers was born in 1864 at Constitution Hill, Chatham, Kent, son of Elizabeth (née Hunt) and Henry Frederick Rivers.

Records from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries show the Rivers family to be solidly middle-class, with many Cambridge, Church of England and Royal Navy associations. Notable members were Gunner William Rivers and his son, Midshipman William Rivers, both of whom served aboard HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship.

His son Midshipman Rivers, who claimed to be "the man who shot the man who fatally wounded Lord Nelson",

left|thumb|Image of the stained glass window of the church in [[Offham, Kent|Offham, Kent, where Henry Rivers was curate from 1880 to 1889]]

In 1863, having obtained a curacy at Chatham in addition to a chaplaincy of the Medway Union, Henry Rivers was sufficiently established to marry Elizabeth Hunt, who was living with her brother James in Hastings, not far from Chatham.

The Hunts, like the Rivers family, were established with naval and Church of England connections. He built up a good practice as a speech therapist and was patronised by Sir John Forbes MD FRS. Forbes referred pupils to him for twenty-four years.

James Hunt was an exuberant character, giving to each of his ventures his boundless energy and self-confidence. He set up the latter with the aid of a doctorate he had purchased in 1856 from the University of Giessen in Germany.

In later, expanded editions, Stammering and Stuttering begins to reflect Hunt's growing passion for anthropology, exploring the nature of language usage and speech disorders in non-European peoples. Hunt's efforts were integral to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) accepting anthropology in 1866 as a discipline. was thought by others to be a defence of the subjection and slavery of Africans in the Americas, and support of the belief in the plurality of human species.

Hunt left his books to his nephew William Rivers, who refused them, thinking that they would be of no use to him.

Early life

William Halse Rivers Rivers was the oldest of four children, with his siblings being brother Charles Hay (29 August 1865 – 8 November 1939) and sisters Ethel Marian (30 October 1867 – 4 February 1943) and Katharine Elizabeth (1871–1939).

thumb|upright=1.1|[[Tonbridge School where Rivers and his brother Charles were day-boys]]

William, known as "Willie" throughout his childhood, Slobodin notes a mistake on the registry of his birth, but it is that his name was changed from the mistaken "William False Rivers Rivers" to its later form, with "Halse" as the second name. This suggests that "Rivers" was intended as a given name as well as a surname.

Rivers had a stammer that he never fully conquered. He had no sensory memory, although he was able to visualise to an extent if dreaming, in a half-waking, half-sleeping state, or when feverish. Rivers noted that in his early life- specifically before the age of five- his visual imagery was far more definite than it became in later life. He thought it was perhaps as good as that of the average child.

Rivers was a highly able child. Educated first at a Brighton preparatory school and, from the age of thirteen, as a dayboy at the prestigious Tonbridge School, his academic abilities were noted from an early age. and even within this older group he was seen to excel, winning prizes for Classics and all around attainment. Rivers's younger brother Charles was also a high achiever at the school; he too was awarded with the Good Work prize.

left|thumb|A young W. H. R. Rivers

Rivers was set to follow family tradition and take his University of Cambridge entrance exam, possibly with the aim of studying classics. Without the scholarship, his family could not afford to send him to Cambridge. With his typical resilience, Rivers did not dwell on the disappointment.

His illness had been severe, entailing long convalescence and leaving him with effects which at times severely disabled him. Rivers's biographer Richard Slobodin says that "among persons of extraordinary achievement, only Descartes seems to have put in as short a working day".

Rivers did not allow his drawbacks to dishearten him, This was the first of many voyages; for, besides his great expeditions for work in the Torres Straits Islands, Melanesia, Egypt, India and the Solomon Islands, he took holiday voyages twice to the West Indies, three times to the Canary Islands and Madeira, to the United States, Norway, and Lisbon, as well as making numerous visits to France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, and lengthy ones to visit family in Australia. Those under Gee were conscious of his indifference towards, if not outright dislike of, the psychological aspects of medicine. Walter Langdon-Brown surmises that Rivers and his fellow Charles S. Myers devoted themselves to these aspects in reaction to Gee.

Rivers's interest in the physiology of the nervous system and in "the mind", that is, in sensory phenomena and mental states,

By 1893, when he was unexpectedly invited to lecture in Cambridge on the functions of the sense organs, he was already deeply read in the subject. He was made a Fellow of the college in 1902.

Rivers was stretched in his work, as he still had ongoing teaching commitments at Guy's hospital and at University College. but they did not discourage the Cambridge psychologists. Psychology began to thrive: "perhaps, in the early days of scientific progress, a subject often grows all the more surely if its workers have to meet difficulties, improvise their apparatus, and rub very close shoulders one with another." Rivers reviewed the work of previous investigators, incorporated his own, and critically examined the rival theories of colour vision. He noted clearly the significance of psychological factors in, for instance, the phenomena of contrast.

Rivers realised that part of the effects – mental and physical – that substances had were caused psychologically by the excitement of knowing that one is indulging. This was the first experiment of its kind to use this double-blind procedure. and, while fond of St John's, the staid lifestyle of his Cambridge existence showed in signs of nervous strain and led him to experience periods of depression. He made Rivers first choice to head an expedition to the Torres Straits.

When the ketch dropped anchor, Rivers and Ray were at first too ill to go ashore. However the others set up a surgery to treat the native islanders and Rivers, lying in bed next-door tested the patients for colour vision: Haddon's diary noted "He is getting some interesting results." In the course of his examinations of the visual acuity of the natives, Rivers showed that colour-blindness did not exist or was very rare, but that the colour vision of Papuans was not the same type as that of Europeans; they possessed no word for blue, and an intelligent native found nothing unnatural in applying the same name to the brilliant blue sea or sky and to the deepest black. "Moreover", Head goes on to state in Rivers's obituary notice, <blockquote>he was able to explode the old fallacy that the 'noble savage' was endowed with powers of vision far exceeding that of civilised natives. Errors of refraction are, it is true, less common, especially myopia. But, altogether the feats of the Torres Straits islanders equalled those reported by travellers from other parts of the world, they were due to the power of attending to minute details in familiar and strictly limited surrounding, and not to supernormal visual acuity. However, these simple tables soon took on a new perspective.

It was at once evident to Rivers that <blockquote>the names applied to the various forms of blood relationship did not correspond to those used by Europeans, but belonged to what is known as a 'classificatory system'; a man's 'brothers' or 'sisters' might include individuals we should call cousins and the key to this nomenclature is to be found in forms of social organisation especially in varieties of the institution of marriage. Both Rivers and Haddon were serious about their work but at the same time they were imbued with a keen sense of humour and fun. Haddon's diary from Tuesday 16 August reads thus: <blockquote>Our friends and acquaintances would often be very much amused if they could see us at some of our occupations and I am afraid these would sometimes give occasion to the enemy to blaspheme – so trivial would they appear ... for example one week we were mad on cat's cradle – at least Rivers, Ray and I were – McDougall soon fell victim and even Myers eventually succumbed. and they are also credited as inventing a system of nomenclature that enabled them to be able to schematise the steps required and teach a variety of string tricks to European audiences.

Todas

Rivers had already formed a career in physiology and psychology. But now he moved more definitively into anthropology. He wanted a demographically small, fairly isolated people, comparable to the island societies of the Torres Strait, where he might be able to get genealogical data on each and every individual. The Todas in the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India, with their population then about 700 plus, suited Rivers's criteria. And they had specific features of social organisation, such as polyandrous marriage and a bifurcation of their society into so-called moieties that had interested historical evolutionists. Whether his fieldwork was initially so single-minded is questionable, however, since at first Rivers looked at other local communities and studied their visual perception before fixing all his attention on the Todas.

Rivers worked among the Todas for less than six months during 1901–02, communicating with his Toda informants only through interpreters and lodged in an Ootacamund hotel. During this time, he assembled a collection of data on the ritual and social lives of the Toda people. In 1906, he published his findings in his book The Todas.

In the preface to this book Rivers wrote that his work was "not merely the record of the customs and beliefs of a people, but also the demonstration of anthropological method". That method is the collection of genealogical materials for the purpose of more fully investigating other aspects of social life, notably ritual.

The first eleven chapters of The Todas represented in 1906 a novel approach to the presentation of ethnographic data, one that, under the influence of Malinowski, would later become a standard practice in British social anthropology. This is the analysis of a people's society and culture by presentation of a detailed description of a particularly significant institution. In the Toda case, it is the sacred dairy cult. But Rivers is unable to sustain this focus throughout the work, so after a brilliant opening, the book tails off somewhat. We get a good idea of the Toda dairies and the ideas of ritual purity that protect them; but then the author returns to the ready-made categories of the day: gods, magic, kinship, clanship, crime and so on, and says no more about the dairies. Moreover, he failed to discover the existence of matrilineal clans alongside the patrilineal ones. A second, and more important, limitation of his study is its failure to view Toda society as a local and specialised variant of—as A. L. Kroeber wrote—"higher Indian culture". Rivers's book has been largely responsible for the view (now not infrequently held by educated Todas themselves) that these are a people quite distinct from other South Indians.

When, in 1902, Rivers left the Nilgiri Hills and India too, he would never return. Moreover, after the publication of The Todas he wrote very little more about them.

"A Human Experiment in Nerve Division"

Upon his return to England from the Torres Strait, Rivers became aware of a series of experiments being conducted by his old friend Henry Head in conjunction with James Sherren, a surgeon at the London Hospital where they both worked.

It quickly became clear to Rivers, looking in on the experiment from a psycho-physical aspect, that the only way accurate results could be obtained from introspection on behalf of the patient is if the subject under investigation was himself a trained observer, sufficiently discriminative to realise if his introspection was being prejudiced by external irrelevancies or moulded by the form of the experimenter's questions, and sufficiently detached to lead a life of detachment throughout the entire course of the tests. it is at this point that the experiment takes on an almost farcical aspect to the casual reader.

From 1908 until the outbreak of the war Rivers was mainly preoccupied with ethnological and sociological problems. Already he had relinquished his official post as lecturer in Experimental Psychology in favour of Charles Samuel Myers, and now held only a lectureship on the physiology of the special senses. By degrees he became more absorbed in anthropological research. But though he was now an ethnologist rather than a psychologist he always maintained that what was of value in his work was due directly to his training in the psychological laboratory. In the laboratory he had learnt the importance of exact method; in the field he now gained vigour and vitality by his constant contact with the actual daily behaviour of human beings.

During 1907–8 Rivers travelled to the Solomon Islands, and other areas of Melanesia and Polynesia. His two-volume History of Melanesian Society (1914), which he dedicated to St Johns, As such, by the time Rivers was assigned to Maghull War Hospital, it was known as the "centre for abnormal psychology", and many of its physicians were employing techniques such as dream interpretation, psychoanalysis and hypnosis to treat shell shock, also known as the war neuroses.

After about a year of service at Maghull War Hospital, Rivers was appointed a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and his two youthful dreams—to be an army doctor and to "go in for insanity"—were realised when he was transferred to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, Scotland in order to help "clean house" following a scandal.

left|frame|W. H. R. Rivers outside Craiglockhart

Rivers's methodology for treating the war neuroses are often, and somewhat unfairly, said to have stemmed from Sigmund Freud. While it is true that Rivers was aware of and was influenced by Freud's theories and by the practice of psychoanalysis, he did not blindly subscribe to all of Freud's premises.

It is on this belief regarding the origins of the war neuroses that he formed his "talking cure". Rivers' "talking cure" was primarily based on the ancient belief of catharsis: the idea that bringing repressed memories into the light of consciousness rids memories and thoughts of their power. Rivers' autognosis consisted of two parts. The first part included "re-education", or educating the patient about the basics of psychology and physiology. River's method also consisted of helping a soldier comprehend that the illness he was experiencing was not "strange" nor permanent. Furthermore, Rivers encouraged his patients to express their emotions in a time when society encouraged men to keep a "stiff upper-lip". River's method, and his deep concern for every individual he treated, made him famous among his clients. Both Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves wrote highly of him during this time. For Rivers, there was a considerable dilemma involved in "curing" his patients simply in order that they could be sent back to the Western Front to die. Rivers's feelings of guilt are clearly portrayed both in fiction and in fact. Through Pat Barker's novels and in Rivers's works (particularly Conflict and Dream) we get a sense of the turmoil the doctor went through. As Sassoon wrote in a letter to Robert Graves (24 July 1918):

Rivers did not wish to "break" his patients, but at the same time he knew that it was their duty to return to the front and his duty to send them. There is also an implication (given the pun on Rivers's name along with other factors) that Rivers was more to Sassoon than just a friend. Sassoon called him "father confessor", a point that Jean Moorcroft Wilson picks up on in her biography of Sassoon; however, Rivers's tight morals would have probably prevented a closer relationship from progressing:

Not only Sassoon, but his patients as a whole, loved him and his colleague Frederic Bartlett wrote of him

Sassoon described Rivers's bedside manner in his letter to Graves, written as he lay in hospital after being shot (a head wound that he had hoped would kill him – he was bitterly disappointed when it did not):

Rivers was well known for his compassionate, effective and pioneering treatments; as Sassoon's testimony reveals, he treated his patients very much as individuals.

Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses

Following his appointment at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Rivers published the results of his experimental treatment of patients in The Lancet, "On the Repression of War Experience", and began to record interesting cases in his book Conflict and Dream, which was published a year after his death by his close friend Grafton Elliot Smith. Rivers' personal and complete theory on the origin of the "psycho-neuroses", including the war neuroses, was not to be published until 1920 with the publication of Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses. He is quoted as saying "I have finished my serious work and I shall just let myself go." In those post war years, his personality seemed to change dramatically. The man who had been most at home in his study, the laboratory, or the field now dined out a good deal, had joined clubs, went yachting and appeared to welcome rather than shun opportunities for public speaking. and the Royal Anthropological Institute (1921–1922).

He had been taken ill suddenly in his rooms at St John's on the evening of Friday 3 June, having sent his servant home to enjoy the summer festivities. By the time he was found in the morning, it was too late and he knew it. Typically for this man who, throughout his life "displayed a complete disregard for personal gain", His loss prompted him to write two poignant poems about the man he had grown to love: "To A Very Wise Man" and "Revisitation".

Others' opinions of Rivers

In the poem The Red Ribbon Dream, written by Robert Graves not long after Rivers's death, he touches on the peace and security he felt in Rivers's rooms:

: For that was the place where I longed to be

: And past all hope where the kind lamp shone.

An anonymously written poem Anthropological Thoughts can be found in the Rivers collection of the Haddon archives at Cambridge. There is a reference that indicates that these lines were written by Charles Elliot Fox, There is also a Rivers Memorial Medal, founded in 1923, which is rewarded each year to an anthropologist who has made a significant impact in his or her field. Appropriately, Haddon was the first to receive this award in 1924.

In fiction

Sassoon writes about Rivers in the third part of The Memoirs of George Sherston, Sherston's Progress. There is a chapter named after the doctor and Rivers appears in the book as the only character to retain his factual name, giving him a position as a sort of demi-god in Sassoon's semi-fictitious memoirs.

The life of W. H. R. Rivers and his encounter with Sassoon was fictionalised by Pat Barker in the Regeneration Trilogy, a series of three books including Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and The Ghost Road (1995). The trilogy was greeted with considerable acclaim, with The Ghost Road being awarded the Booker Prize in the year of its publication. Regeneration was filmed in 1997 with Jonathan Pryce in the role of Rivers.

The first book, Regeneration deals primarily with Rivers's treatment of Sassoon at Craiglockhart. In the novel we are introduced to Rivers as a doctor for whom healing patients comes at price. The dilemmas faced by Rivers are brought to the fore and the strain leads him to become ill; on sick leave he visits his brother and the Heads and we learn more about his relationships outside of hospital life. We are also introduced in the course of the novel to the Canadian doctor Lewis Yealland, another factual figure who used electric shock treatment to "cure" his patients. The juxtaposition of the two very different doctors highlights the unique, or at least unconventional, nature of Rivers' methods and the humane way in which he treated his patients (even though Yealland's words, and his own guilt and modesty lead him to think otherwise).

The Eye in the Door concentrates, for the most part, on Rivers' treatment of the fictional character of Prior. Although Prior's character may not have existed, the facts that he makes Rivers face up to did – that something happened to him on the first floor of his house that caused him to block all visual memory and begin to stammer. We also learn of Rivers' treatment of officers in the airforce and of his work with Head. Sassoon too plays a role in the book- Rivers visits him in hospital where he finds him to be a different, if not broken, man, his attempt at 'suicide' having failed. This second novel in the trilogy, both implicitly and directly, addresses the issue of Rivers' possible homosexuality and attraction to Sassoon. From Rivers' reaction to finding out that Sassoon is in hospital to the song playing in the background ('You Made Me Love You') and Ruth Head's question to her husband, "Do you think he's in love with him?" we get a strong impression of the author's opinions on Rivers' sexuality.

The Ghost Road, the final part of the trilogy, shows a side of Rivers not previously seen in the novels. As well as his relationship with his sisters and father, we also learn of his feelings for Charles Dodgson- or Lewis Carroll. Carroll was the first adult Rivers met who stammered as badly as he did and yet he cruelly rejected him, preferring to lavish attention on his pretty young sisters. In this novel the reader also learns of Rivers' visit to Melanesia; feverish with Spanish Flu, the doctor is able to recount the expedition and we are provided with insight both into the culture of the island and into Rivers' very different "field trip persona".

Rivers appears briefly in The God of the Hive, the tenth novel in the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series by mystery writer Laurie R. King, in which he is the author of a medical letter, written during the war, concerning one of that novel's characters.

Rivers appears in Francois Smith's 2014 Afrikaans novel Kamphoer (published in English as The Camp Whore), based on a true story during the Anglo-Boer War . The protagonist, a teenage Afrikaans girl, is raped by British soldiers; Rivers offers her inspiration, through his humane supportive treatment of soldiers. In adulthood, she becomes a psychiatric nurse to overcome her own trauma. In a twist of events, she treats one of the soldiers who had attacked her years earlier.

Rivers appears in the film Benediction, played by Ben Daniels.

Bibliography

"A Modification of Aristotle's Experiment" (Mind, New Series, Vol. 3, No. 12, Oct. 1894, pp. 583–584)
"Review of O. Külpe's 'Grundriss d. Psychologie auf experimenteller Grundlage dargestellt'" (Mind, New Series, 3, pp. 413–17)
"Review of H. Maudsley's 'Pathology of Mind', and E. Kräpelin's 'Psychologische Arbeiten'" (Mind, New Series, 4, pp. 400–3)
"On the apparent size of objects" (Mind, New Series, Vol. 5, No. 17, Jan. 1896, pp. 71–80)
"The senses of primitive man" (Abstract in Science, New Series, 11, pp. 740–1, and trans. 'Über die Sinne d. primitiven Menschen'in Umschau, 25)
"On the function of the maternal uncle in Torres Straits" (Man, Vol. 1, 1901, pp. 171–172)
"The Todas". Map, illus., 22 cm. London
"Review of Sex and Society by W. I. Thomas" (Man, Vol. 7, 1907, pp. 111–111)
"A human experiment in nerve division" (with H. Head) (Brain, XXXI., pp. 323–450)
The illusion of compared horizontal and vertical lines (with G.D. Hicks), and The influence of small doses of alcohol on the capacity for muscular work (with H.N. Webber) (Br. J. Psychol., II., pp. 252–5)
"Medicine, Magic and Religion" (Fitzpatrick Lects. 1915) (originally published in stages. Lancet XCIV., pp. 59–65, 117–23)
"The Repression of War Experience" (Lancet, XCVI., pp. 513–33)
"Psychiatry and the War" (Science, New Series, Vol. 49, No. 1268 (18 Apr 1919), pp. 367–369)
Conflict and Dream (edit. G. Elliot Smith). London, 1923.