W. H. R. Rivers
William Halse Rivers Rivers 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 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.
Image:Turner, The Battle of Trafalgar.jpg|right|thumb|HMS Victory
The senior Rivers was the master gunner aboard the Victory. He kept a commonplace book ; it has revealed and preserved the thoughts of many of the sailors aboard the Victory.
His son Midshipman Rivers, who claimed to be "the man who shot the man who fatally wounded Lord Nelson", was a model of heroism in the Battle of Trafalgar. The seventeen-year-old midshipman nearly lost his foot when it was struck by a grenade; it was attached to him only "by a Piece of Skin abought 4 inch above the ankle". Rivers asked first for his shoes, then told the gunner's mate to look after the guns, and told Captain Hardy that he was going down to the cockpit. He endured the amputation of his leg four inches below the knee, without anaesthetic. According to legend, he did not cry out once during that nor during the consequent sealing of the wound with hot tar. When Gunner Rivers, anxious about his son's welfare, went to the cockpit to ask after him, his son called out, "Here I am, Father, nothing is the matter with me; only lost my leg and that in a good cause."
After the battle, the senior Rivers wrote a poem about his remarkable son, entitled "Lines on a Young Gentleman that lost his leg onboard the Victory in the Glorious action at Trafalgar":
Born to Lieutenant William Rivers, R.N., and his wife, stationed at Deptford, Henry Frederick Rivers followed many family traditions in being educated at Trinity College, Cambridge and entering the church. Having earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1857, he was ordained as a Church of England priest in 1858, and had a career that would span almost 50 years. In 1904, he was forced to tender his resignation due to "infirmities of sight and memory".
Image:Offham Church.jpg|left|thumb|Image of the stained glass window of the church in 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. He was later appointed to curacies in Kent at St Mary's, Chatham, Tudeley and Offham, and subsequently as Vicar of St Faith's, Maidstone from 1889 to 1904.
The Hunts, like the Rivers family, were established with naval and Church of England connections. One of those destined for the pulpit was Thomas, but some quirk of originality set him off into an unusual career. While an undergraduate at Cambridge, Thomas Hunt had a friend who stammered badly and his efforts to aid the affected student led him to leave the university without taking a degree in order to make a thorough study of speech and its defects. 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. Hunt's most famous case came about in 1842. George Pearson, the chief witness in a case related to an attempted attack on Queen Victoria by John Francis, was brought into court but was incapable of giving his evidence. After a fortnight's instruction from Hunt, he spoke easily, a fact certified by the sitting magistrate. Hunt died in 1851, survived by his wife Mary and their two children. His practice was passed on to his son, James.
James Hunt was an exuberant character, giving to each of his ventures his boundless energy and self-confidence. Taking up his father's legacy with great zeal, by the age of 21 Hunt had published his compendious work Stammering and Stuttering, Their Nature and Treatment. This went into six editions during his lifetime and was reprinted again in 1870, just after his death, and for an eighth time in 1967 as a landmark in the history of speech therapy. In the introduction to the 1967 edition of the book, Elliot Schaffer notes that in his short lifetime, James Hunt is said to have treated over 1,700 cases of speech impediment, firstly in his father's practice and later at his own institute, Ore House near Hastings. 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. In 1856, Hunt had joined the Ethnological Society of London and by 1859 he was its joint secretary. But many of the members disliked his attacks on the religious and humanitarian agencies represented by missionaries and the anti-slavery movement.
As a result of the antagonism, Hunt founded the Anthropological Society and became its president. Nearly 60 years later, his nephew W. He. R. Rivers was selected for this position. Hunt's efforts were integral to the British Association for the Advancement of Science accepting anthropology in 1866 as a discipline.
Even by Victorian standards, Hunt was a decided racist. His paper "On a Negro's Place in Nature", delivered before the BAAS in 1863, was met with hisses and catcalls. What Hunt considered "a statement of the simple facts" 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.
In addition to his extremist views, Hunt led the society to incur heavy debts. The controversies surrounding his conduct told on his health and, on 29 August 1869, Hunt died of "inflammation of the brain". He was survived by his widow, Henrietta Maria, and five children.
His speech therapy practice was passed onto Hunt's brother-in-law, Henry Rivers, who had been working with him for some time. Rivers inherited many of Hunt's established patients, most notably The Reverend Charles L. Dodgson, who had been a regular visitor to Ore House.
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 and sisters Ethel Marian and Katharine Elizabeth.William, known as "Willie" throughout his childhood, appears to have been named after his famous uncle of Victory fame; there was also a longstanding family tradition whereby the eldest son of every line would be baptised by that name. The origin of "Halse" is unclear. There may be some naval connection, as it has been suggested that it could have been the name of someone serving alongside his uncle. Slobodin states that it is probable that the second "Rivers" entered his name as a result of a clerical error on the baptismal certificate, but since the register is filled in by his father's hand, and his father performed the ceremony, this seems unlikely. 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.
At first, Rivers had concluded that his loss of visual imagery had resulted from his lack of attention and interest in it. But, as he later came to realise, while images from his later life frequently faded into obscurity, those from his infancy still remained vivid.
As Rivers notes in Instinct and the Unconscious, he was unable to visualise any part of the upper floor of the house he lived in until he was five. By contrast, Rivers was able to describe the lower floors of that particular house with far more accuracy than he had been able to with any house since. Although images of later houses were faded and incomplete, no memory since had been as inaccessible as that of the upper floor of his early home. Given evidence, Rivers came to conclude that something had happened to him on the upper floor of that house, the memory of which was entirely suppressed because it "interfered with comfort and happiness". In addition to that specific memory being inaccessible, his sensory memory in general appears to have been severely disabled from that moment.
Author Pat Barker, in the second novel of her Regeneration Trilogy related to Rivers and his work, The Eye in the Door, suggested through her character Billy Prior, that Rivers's experience was traumatic enough to cause him to "put his mind's eye out".
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. At the age of 14, he was placed a year above others of his age at school 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. He studied and became a civil engineer. After a bad bout of malaria contracted whilst in the Torres Straits with his brother, he was encouraged by the elder Rivers to take up outdoor work.
The teenage Rivers, whilst scholarly, was also involved in other aspects of school life. As the programme for the Tonbridge School sports day notes, on 12 March 1880 – Rivers's sixteenth birthday – he ran in the mile race. The year before this he had been elected as a member of the school debating society, no mean feat for a boy who at this time had a speech impediment which was almost paralytic.
Image:Young Rivers.jpg|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. But at the age of sixteen, he contracted typhoid fever and was forced to miss his final year of school. 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. As L. E. Shore notes: "he was not a strong man, and was often obliged to take a few days rest in bed and subsist on a milk diet". The severity of the sickness and the shattering of dreams might have broken lesser men but for Rivers in many ways the illness was the making of him. Whilst recovering from the fever, Rivers had formed a friendship with one of his father's speech therapy students, a young Army surgeon. His plan was formed: he would study medicine and apply for training in the Army Medical Department, later to become the Royal Army Medical Corps.
Inspired by this new resolve, Rivers studied medicine at the University of London, where he matriculated in 1882, and St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. He graduated at age 22, the youngest person to do so until recent times.