W. H. R. Rivers

File:Whr rivers sml.png

Photograph of W.H.R. Rivers

William Halse Rivers Rivers M.D.(Lond.), F.R.C.P.(Lond.), F.R.S., Medical Officer, Craiglockhart War Hospital (March 12, 1864 - 4 June, 1922) was an English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist, best known for his work with shell-shocked soldiers during World War I. Rivers' most famous patient was the poet Siegfried Sassoon. He is also famous for his participation in the Torres Straits expedition of 1898, and his consequent seminal work on the subject of kinship.

Biography

Pre-War

Rivers was born in 1864 at Constitution Hill, Chatham, Kent son of Elizabeth Hunt (1834-1897) and Henry Fredrick Rivers (1830–1911), an Anglican priest and speech therapist who treated Lewis Carroll among others. The oldest of four children (siblings were Charles Hay Rivers, born in 1865, Ethel Marion Rivers, born in 1867 and Katharine Elizabeth Rivers, born in 1871) William (or 'Willie' as he was called throughout his childhood) took his name from his uncle 'William Rivers' who, according to family tradition, had been the man who shot the man who had fatally wounded Lord Nelson . It is unclear where the 'Halse' part of his name originated- although it has been suggested that it could have been the name of someone serving along side his uncle. It is probable that the second 'Rivers' entered his name as a result of a clerical error which occurred due to a mix up between his surname and place of birth .

Rivers suffered from a stammer that never truly left him, he also had no visual memory. He dedicated Chapter II of his book Instinct and the Unconscious to describe his lack of visual memory.

Pat Barker, in the third novel in her Regeneration Trilogy, The Ghost Road suggests a reason for these problems but Rivers himself, although he may have had some idea of the causes, does not appear to cite them fully in his writings. However, in Instinct and the Unconscious he also states that he had at least begun to realise the cause.

He later concluded that something must have happened to him on the top floor of his house so terrible- at least to a child- that he had blocked not just the memory of the place and event but the ability to remember visually in general; in the words of Barker's character Billy Prior, Rivers "put his mind's eye out".

However, these things did not seem to affect his academic performance. Educated at Tonbridge School, his teachers began to take note of his "definite scientific bent". He was set to take his University of Cambridge entrance exam in order to follow in the footsteps of his father, uncle and grandfather. Unfortunately, his plans were thwarted when, at the age of sixteen, he was struck down by typhoid fever and forced to miss a year of school. Instead of Cambridge, Rivers studied medicine at the University of London, where he matriculated in 1882, and St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. He graduated aged just 22, the youngest person to do so until recent times.

After qualifying, Rivers sought to join the Royal Army Medical Corps but was not passed fit- as Elliot Smith was later to write, as quoted in Rivers' biography:

Rivers always had to fight against ill health: heart and blood vessels.

He had been slow to recover from his fever and, along with the health problems, had been left to the curse of "tiring easily". His sister Katharine wrote that when he came to visit the family he would often sleep for the first day or two. Astonishingly, considering the work that Rivers did in his relatively short lifetime, Seligman wrote in 1922 that "for many years he seldom worked for more than four hours a day". As Rivers' biographer Richard Slobodin points out:

Among persons of extraordinary achievement, only Descartes seems to have put in as short a working day

Instead of entering the army, his love of travelling lead him to serve several terms as a ship's surgeon, travelling to Japan and North America in 1887. Such voyages helped to improve his health. On one voyage, he spent a month in the company of George Bernard Shaw “many hours every day talking - the greatest treat of my life”.

Back in England, Rivers became house surgeon at Chichester Infirmary (1887–9) and house physician at St Bartholomew's (1889–90). In 1891 he joined the Neurological Society and became house physician at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic. Here he met John Hughlings Jackson, Michael Foster, Henry Head, and Charles S. Sherrington. He also worked with Victor Horsley on investigations into the existence and nature of electrical currents in the mammalian brain, conducted at University College, London (UCL).

Rivers resigned from the National Hospital in 1892 and travelled to Jena where he worked with Ewald Hering. During his visit he wrote in his diary:

I have during the last three weeks come to the conclusion that I should go in for insanity when I return to England and work as much as possible at psychology.

On his return he was appointed clinical assistant at Bethlem Royal Hospital, and the next year assisted G. H. Savage on his lectures on mental diseases at Guy's Hospital. About this time he also began to lecture on experimental psychology at UCL. By 1893 Rivers was teaching physiology at Cambridge and spent that summer working in Heidelberg with Emil Kräpelin on measuring the effects of fatigue.

He accepted a post as lecturer in psychology at St John's College in 1897 (he was elected a fellow in 1902 ). In 1907 he was appointed to the newly established lectureship of physiology and experimental psychology and made director of the university's new psychology laboratory, the first of its kind in Great Britain .

In addition, Rivers joined the university's expedition to the Torres Strait Islands in 1898, organised by his close friend Alfred Court Haddon. He had been reluctant to join at first, never having been interested in anthropology before; he had previously gone as far as to decline the invitation to own his uncle's old anthropology library. After what Haddon described as his 'seduction' of Rivers to anthropology, he joined, and thrived upon the trip . However, the expedition had seemed doomed to fail before it had started; on the ship the members were too sea sick to move with Rivers and Ray both having the added discomfort of badly sunburnt legs- Rivers' skin went black around the shins and he was unable to move. In addition, the ship dragged anchor in the dangerous waters around the Straits and the siuation seemed dire for a time. When they finally arrived, Rivers was too ill to leave the ship for several days but when he did, sick and miserable, the natives of the island made up for it at once with their warm attitudes. He performed some of the first experiments in cross-cultural psychology and also developed the genealogical method as a key to the study of social organization.

The Cambridge scientists (Haddon, Rivers, Myers, McDougall, Seligman and Ray) spent almost eight months working in the different islands of the Torres Straits. They conducted tests; they interviewed native subjects; and they collected information on local customs and practises.

(The Ethnographer's Eye)

He then spent several months during 1901–2 among the Toda people of south-west India. The resulting monograph, The Todas (1906), set new standards of ethnological accuracy. In the following years he began to propound diffusionism, the doctrine that cultural traits were not independently invented but carried from one area to another. Despite his love of adventure and his obvious intellect, Rivers was still an extremely shy young man at this point:

In the Cambridge physiological laboratory he had to lecture to a large elementary class. He was rather nervous about it, and did not like it. This was partly owing to a hesitation of speech, which at times was quite embarrassing when he was speaking without notes. So he wrote out his lectures pretty fully... As a result many of his thoughts are preserved for us which would otherwise be lost

(L.E Shaw, physiologist friend of Rivers and his neighbour at St. John's for many years).

His experiences both at home and abroad increased his interests in the relationship between mind and body, and he played a fundamental role in the establishment of both experimental psychology and social anthropology as academic disciplines in Britain. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1908 and won the Society's gold medal in 1914 (information obtained from Rivers fonds)

In 1903, Rivers' embarked on one of his most famous experiments, carried out with (and on) his close friend Dr Henry Head to study the regeneration of nerve tissue. Head severed two of the cutaneous nerves in his left forearm and sutured the ends together. He and Rivers then spent four years mapping the recovery of sensory perception in Head's arm. The experiment reinforced beliefs that ‘civilized’ man retains underneath an evolutionary primitive nervous system. His slightly later work on the influence of alcohol and caffeine on fatigue was also one of the first experiments to rely on a double-blind procedure.

For five happy years we worked together on weekends and holidays in the quiet atmosphere of (Rivers’) rooms in St John’s College

(Head 1923)

Although Rivers was the investigator in this experiment, he was survived by Head who came to publish their work and is, therefore, given a great deal of the credit that is, perhaps, due to Rivers. Rivers was to work closely with Henry again during the latter part of the war when he was appointed psychologist to the Royal Flying Corps, attached to the Central Hospital in Hampstead.

In 1904, with Professor James Ward and some others, Rivers founded the British Journal of Psychology of which he was at first joint editor.

From 1908 till the outbreak of the late war Dr. Rivers was mainly preoccupied with ethnological and sociological problems. Already he had relinquished his official post as Lecturer in Experimental Psychology in favour of Dr. 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 ethnologist rather than 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 vigor 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) presented a diffusionist thesis for the development of culture in the south-west Pacific. In the year of publication he made a second journey to Melanesia, returning to England in March 1915, to find that war had broken out.

World War One

During the war, he worked as a RAMC captain at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, where he applied techniques of psychoanalysis to British officers suffering from various forms of neurosis brought on by their war experiences.

Rivers, by pursuing a course of humane treatment, had established two principles that would be embraced by American military psychiatrists in the next war. He had demonstrated, first, that men of unquestioned bravery could succumb to overwhelming fear and, second, that the most effective motivation to overcome that fear was something stronger than patriotism, abstract principles, or hatred of the enemy. It was the love of soldiers for one another.

W.H.R. Rivers outside Craiglockhart

Rivers' methods are often, somewhat unfairly, said to have stemmed from Sigmund Freud (essays such as Freud and the War Neuroses: Pat Barker's "Regeneration" gladly compare the two) however, this is not truly the case as you can read both in Pat Barker's novels and in the words of friends such as Myers. Although he was aware of Freud's theories and methods, he did not necessarily prescribe to them (See Pat Barker's Regeneration pg 28- 32- Penguin Books- for his interpretation on dreams. For this, see also Rivers' Conflict and Dream for his methods of dream analysis and his thoughts on Freud). While he 'admitted', as Myers describes, 'the conflict of social factors with the sexual instincts in certain psychoneuroses' of civilian life, he saw the instinct of self-preservation, and not the sexual instinct, as the driving force behind war neuroses . He, therefore, formed his 'talking cure' not on the basis that soldiers were repressing sexual urges but rather their feelings of fear pertaining to their war experiences. As such, he really is a pioneer in his field- both for his new methods and for the fact that he went against the grain of the beliefs of the time (Shell-Shock wasn't considered a 'real' illness and 'cures' mainly involved electric shocks, with doctors such as Lewis Yealland were particularly keen on this form of 'treatment') Rivers' treatment also went against the grain of the society he too had been brought up in- he didn't advocate the usual 'stiff upper-lip' approach but rather told his patients to express their emotions.

Sassoon came to him in 1917 after publicly protesting against the war and refusing to return to his regiment, but was treated with sympathy and given much leeway until he voluntarily returned to France . 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' feelings of guilt are clearly portrayed both in fiction and in fact. In Pat Barker's novels and in Rivers' 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 (24th July 1918):

O Rivers please take me. And make me
Go back to the war til it break me...

He 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' name along with other factors) that Rivers was more to Sassoon that just a friend and, as he called him, 'father confessor', a point that Jean Moorcroft Wilson picks up on in her biography of Sassoon, however Rivers' tight morals would have probably prevented such a relationship from progressing:

Rivers’ uniform was not the only constraint in their relationship. He was almost certainly homosexual by inclination and it must quickly have become clear to him that Sassoon was too. Yet neither is likely to have referred to it, though we know that Sassoon was already finding his sexuality a problem. At the same time, as an experienced psychologist Rivers could reasonably expect Sassoon to experience ‘transference’ and become extremely fond of him. Paul Fussell suggests in The Great War and Modern Memory(ISBN 0195019180) that Rivers became the embodiment of the male ‘dream friend’ who had been the companion of Sassoon’s boyhood fantasies. Sassoon publicly acknowledged that ‘there was never any doubt about my liking [Rivers]. He made me feel safe at once, and seemed to know all about me’. But Sassoon’s description of the doctor in 'Sherston’s Progress', lingering as it does on Rivers’s warm smile and endearing habits- he often sat, spectacles pushed up on forehead, with his hands clasped around one knee- suggests that it was more than liking he felt. And privately he was rather franker, telling Marsh, whom he knew would understand, that he ‘loved [Rivers] at first sight.’

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

Rivers was intolerant and sympathetic. He was once compared to Moses laying down the law. The comparison was an apt one, and one side of the truth. The other side of him was his sympathy. It was a sort of power of getting into another man's life and treating it as if it were his own. And yet all the time he made you feel that your life was your own to guide, and above everything that you could if you cared make something important out of it.

Sassoon described Rivers' 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 didn't):

But yesterday my reasoning Rivers ran solemnly in,
With peace in the pools of his spectacled eyes and a wisely omnipotent grin;
And I fished in that steady grey stream and decided that I
after all am no longer the Worm that refuses to die.

He was well known for his compassionate, effective and pioneering treatments; as Sassoon's testimony reveals, he treated his patients very much as individuals. Rivers published the results of his experimental treatment of patients at Craiglockhart in a The Lancet paper '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.

Post War

After the war, Rivers became "another and far happier man- diffidence gave place to confidence, reticence to outspokenness, a somewhat laboured literary style to one remarkable for ease and charm" . 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. Always having been a voracious reader, he now began reading in philosophy, as he had not done for some years, and also in imaginative literature. Not all of his friends from former years welcomed these changes; some felt that, along with his shyness, his scientific caution and good sense may have deserted him to a degree but most people who saw how happy Rivers had become agreed that the slight alterations to his character were for the better. Rivers had visited his college frequently during the war although, having resigned his position as lecturer, he held no official post. However, upon his return from the Royal Flying Corps in 1919, the college created a new office for him- 'Praelector of Natural Science Studies- and he was given a free rein to do as he pleased. As Leonard E. Shore recalled in 1923:

when I asked him if he would undertake that work... his eyes shone with a new light I had not seen before, and he paced his rooms for several minutes full of delight.

He took his new position to be a mandate to get to know every science student and indeed every other student at St. Johns and at other colleges. He would arrange 'At Homes' in his rooms on Sunday evenings, as well as Sunday morning breakfast meetings; he also organised informal discussions and formal lectures (many of which he gave himself) in the College Hall. He formed a group called The Socratics and brought to it some of his most influential friends, including H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Bertrand Russell and Sassoon. Sassoon (Patient B in 'Conflict and Dream'), remained particularly friendly with Rivers and regarded him as a mentor. They shared Socialist sympathies.

Captain W.H.R. Rivers RAMC

Having already been made president of the anthropological section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1911, after the war he became president of the Folk Law Society (1921), and the Royal Anthropological Institute (1921-1922). He was also awarded honorary degrees from the universities of Manchester, St. Andrews and Cambridge in 1919.

Rivers died of a strangulated hernia in the summer of 1922, shortly after being named as a Labour candidate for the 1922 general election. He had agreed to run for parliament, as he said:

because the times are so ominous, the outlook for our own country and the world so black, that if others think I can be of service in political life, I cannot refuse.

— [1]

He had been taken ill suddenly in his rooms at St. John's on the evening of Friday 3rd 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 , he was selfless to the last. There is a document granting approval for the diploma in anthropology to be awarded as of Easter term, 1922, to an undergraduate student from India. It is signed by Haddon and Rivers dated 4th June, 1922. At the bottom is a notation in Haddon's handwriting:

Dr. Rivers signed the report on this examination on the morning of the day he died. It was his last official act. A.C.H

Rivers signed the papers as he lay dying in the Evelyn Nursing Home following an unsuccessful emergency operation. He had an extravagant funeral at St. John's in accordance with his wishes as he was an expert on funeral rites and was put to rest in the chuchyard of St Giles Church, Cambridge. Sassoon was deeply saddened by the death of his father figure and collapsed at his funeral. His loss prompted him to write two poignant poems about the man he had grown to love: "To A Very Wise Man" and "Revisitation"[2].

Others' Opinions of Rivers

Poetry

In the poem The Red Ribbon Dream, written by Robert Graves not long after Rivers' death, he touches on the peace and security he felt in Rivers' 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, missionary and ethnographer friend of Rivers.

Quotes

In Sassoon's autobiography (under the guise of 'The Memoirs of George Sherston') Rivers is one of the few characters to retain their original names. There is a whole chapter devoted to Rivers and he is immortalised by Sassoon as a near demi-god who saved his life and his soul. Sassoon wrote:

I very much like to meet Rivers in the next life. It is difficult to believe that such a man as he could be extinguished.

— preface to Medicine, Magic and Religion

Rivers was much loved and admired, not just by Sassoon. Bartlett wrote of his experiences of Rivers in one of his obituaries, as well as in many other articles (see 'References') as the man had a profound influence on his life:

On June 3 last year I was walking through the grounds of St. John's College, here in Cambridge, when I met Dr. Rivers returning from a stroll. He was full of energy and enthusiasm, and began at once to talk about certain new courses of lectures which he proposed to deliver at the Psychological Laboratory during the present year. On the evening of the next day I heard that he was dangerously ill. As I approached the College on the morning of June 5 I saw the flag at half mast. He had, in fact, died in the early afternoon of the preceding day. Never have I known so deep a gloom settle upon the College as fell upon it at that time. There was hardly a man-young or old-who did not seem to be intimately and personally affected. Rivers knew nearly everybody. As Praelector of Natural Sciences at St. John's he interviewed all the science freshmen when they came first into residence and, in an amazing number of cases, he kept in close touch with them throughout their Cambridge career. Everybody who came into contact with him was stimulated and helped to a degree which those who are acquainted only with his published works can never fully realise... it is of Rivers as a man that we think; of his eager and unconquerable optimism, and of his belief in the possible greatness of all things human. Whatever may be the verdict of the years upon his published works, the influence of his vivid personality will remain for all who knew him as one of the best things that have ever entered their lives.

— 

Rivers' legacy continues even today in the form of The Rivers Centre, which treats patients suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder using the same famously humane methods as Rivers had. 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.

Published Works

• Colour vision. In Reports of the Cambridge anthropological expedition to Torres Straits (1901)
• 'Observations on the vision of the Ur’alis and Sholagas' Rivers (1903)
• 'Observations on the senses of the Todas' Rivers (1905)
• The Todas, Rivers (1906)
• 'The Action of Drugs' Rivers (1908)

• W H R Rivers (1914). The History of Melanesian Society (PDF). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. OCLC 61921385, OCLC 61994016.
• 'Kinship and Social Organization' Rivers (1915)
• Entry on psycho-therapeutics in volume 10 of the 'Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics' (1918)
• 'The Repression of War Experience' Rivers' Lancet Paper (1918)
• W H R Rivers (1919). Instinct and the Unconscious. London: British Psychological Society. OCLC 71767201, OCLC 60229971. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• 'Medicine, Magic and Religion' Rivers (1923)
• W H R Rivers (1923). Conflict and Dream. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. ISBN 1417980192. OCLC 1456588.
• W H R Rivers (1924). Social Organisation. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. OCLC 46341063. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

In Fiction

He was a very humane, a very compassionate person who was tormented really by the suffering he saw, and very sceptical about the war, but at the same time he didn't feel he could go the whole way and say no, stop.

(Pat Barker)

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 both books as the only character to retain his factual name, giving him a position as a sort of demi-god in Sassoon's semi-fictitious memories.

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' 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 might 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 showing 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 Melenasia; 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 personae'.

External Links

• W.H.R Rivers: A Founding Father Worth Remembering
• 'Everything is Relatives: William Rivers'
• Cambridge Museum of Anthropology
• Counter-Attack biography
• The Rivers Centre
• Torres Straits Essay
• Colour Terms
• 'W H R Rivers and the hazards of interpretation'
• 'Cultures Under Siege'
• Historicism
• Viewing Notes for 'Everything is Relatives'
• Torres Straits photo
• Sound files from the Torres Straits
• 'The Ethnographer's Eye'