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.
The senior Rivers was the master gunner aboard the Victory. He kept a commonplace book (now held in the Royal Naval Museum library in Portsmouth); 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".
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 (1863–1869), Tudeley (1877–1880) and Offham (1880–1889), 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 (BAAS) 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 (better known as Lewis Carroll), 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 (29 August 1865 – 8 November 1939) and sisters Ethel Marian (30 October 1867 – 4 February 1943) and Katharine Elizabeth (1871–1939).
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 [his] 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.
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.
Life as a ship's surgeon
After qualifying, Rivers sought to join the army but was not passed fit. This was a byproduct of typhoid fever. As Elliot Smith was later to write, as quoted in a biography of Rivers: "Rivers always had to fight against ill health: heart and blood vessels." Along with the health problems noted by Shore and Smith, Rivers struggled with "tiring easily".
His sister Katharine wrote that when he came to visit the family, he would often sleep for the first day or two. Considering the volume of work that Rivers completed in his relatively short lifetime, Seligman wrote in 1922 that "for many years he seldom worked for more than four hours a day". 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, and he chose to serve several terms as a ship's surgeon, travelling to Japan and North America in 1887. 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.
Such voyages helped to improve his health, and possibly to prolong his life. He also took a great deal of pleasure from his experiences aboard ship. On one voyage he spent a month in the company of playwright George Bernard Shaw; he later described how he spent "many hours every day talking – the greatest treat of my life".
Beginnings of career in psychology
Back in England, Rivers earned an M.D. (London) and was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. Soon after, he became house surgeon at the Chichester Infirmary (1887–1889). Although he enjoyed the town and the company of his colleagues, an appointment at Bart's and the opportunity to return to working in research in medicine was more appealing. He became house physician at St Bartholomew's in 1889 and remained there until 1890.
At Bart's, Rivers had been a physician to Samuel Gee. 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 interests in neurology and psychology became evident in this period. Reports and papers given by Rivers at the Abernethian Society of St Bart's indicate a growing specialisation in these fields: Delirium and its allied conditions (1889), Hysteria (1891) and Neurasthenia (1893).
Following the direction of his passion for the workings of the mind as it correlates with the workings of the body, in 1891 Rivers became house physician at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic. Here he and Henry Head met and formed a lasting friendship.
Rivers's interest in the physiology of the nervous system and in "the mind", that is, in sensory phenomena and mental states, was further stimulated by work in 1891. He was chosen to be one of Victor Horsley's assistants in a series of investigations at University College London that explored the existence and nature of electrical currents in the mammalian brain. His selection for this work demonstrated his growing reputation as a researcher.
In the same year, Rivers joined the Neurological Society of London and presented A Case of Treadler's Cramp to a meeting of the society. The case demonstrated the ill effects of what is understood as repetitive motion injury. Such injuries sustained by factory workers, against which they had little protection or compensation, were part of the cost for millions of people of Britain's industrial supremacy.
Resigning from the National Hospital in 1892, Rivers travelled to Jena to expand his knowledge of experimental psychology. Whilst in Jena, Rivers became fluent in German and attended lectures on both psychology and philosophy. He also became deeply immersed in the culture; in a diary he kept of the journey he comments on the buildings, picture galleries, church services, and education system, showing his wide interests and critical judgement. In this diary he also wrote that: "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."
After his return to England, he became a Clinical Assistant at the Bethlem Royal Hospital. In 1893, at the request of G. H Savage, he began assisting with lectures in mental diseases at Guy's Hospital, emphasising their psychological aspect. At about the same time, invited by Professor Sully, he began to lecture on experimental psychology at University College London.
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 had been captivated by Head's accounts of the works of Ewald Hering, and had avidly absorbed his views on colour vision and the nature of vital processes in living matter. He also prepared for this project by spending the summer working in Heidelberg with Emil Kraepelin on measuring the effects of fatigue.
The offer of a Cambridge lectureship resulted from continuing evolution within the university's Natural Science Tripos. Earlier in 1893, Professor McKendrick, of Glasgow, had examined the subject and reported unfavourably on the scant knowledge of the special senses that was displayed by the candidates; to correct this, Sir Michael Foster appointed Rivers as a lecturer. He became Fellow Commoner at St John's College. 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. In addition to these mounting responsibilities, in 1897 he was put in temporary charge of the new psychological laboratory at University College. That year Foster had assigned him a room in the Physiology Department at Cambridge for use in psychological research. As a result, Rivers is listed in the histories of experimental psychology as simultaneously the director of the first two psychological laboratories in Britain.
Rivers's work has been considered to have profound influence on Cambridge and in the scientific world in general. But, at the time, the Cambridge University Senate were wary of his appointment. Bartlett wrote: "how many times have I heard Rivers, spectacles waving in the air, his face lit by his transforming smile, tell how, in Senatorial discussion, an ancient orator described him as a 'Ridiculous Superfluity'!"
The opposition of the Senate resulted in limited support for Rivers's work in its early years. It was not until 1901, eight years after his appointment, that he was allowed the use of a small cottage for the laboratory, and budgeted thirty-five pounds annually (later increased to fifty) for purchase and upkeep of equipment. For several years Rivers continued in this way until the Moral Science Board increased support; in 1903, Rivers and his assistants and students moved to another small building in St Tibbs Row. These working spaces were characterised as "dismal", "damp, dark and ill-ventilated" 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." In 1912 a well-equipped laboratory was finally built under the directorship of Charles S. Myers, one of Rivers's earliest and ablest pupils. A wealthy man, he supplemented the university grant with his own funds.
The Cambridge psychologists and Rivers were initially most interested in the special senses: colour vision, optical illusions, sound-reactions, and perceptual processes. In these fields, Rivers was rapidly becoming eminent. He was invited to write a chapter on vision for Schäfer's Handbook of Physiology. According to Bartlett, Rivers's chapter "still remains, from a psychological point of view, one of the best in the English Language". 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.
For his own experiments on vision, Rivers worked with graduate medical students Charles S. Myers and William McDougall. They assisted him and developed close friendships in the process of working together. Rivers also collaborated with Sir Horace Darwin, a pioneer instrument maker, to improve apparatus for recording sensations, especially those involved in vision. This collaboration also resulted in a lifelong friendship between the two men.
In this period, Rivers also investigated the influence of stimulants: tea, coffee, alcohol, tobacco, and a number of other drugs, on a person's capacity for both physical and mental work. His work under Kraepelin at Heidelberg had prepared him for this work. Rivers conducted some experiments on himself, for instance for two years giving up alcoholic beverages and tobacco, neither of which he liked, but also giving up all tea, coffee and cocoa as well. Initially he intended to explore physiological incentives for consuming these products, but he quickly realised that a strong psychological influence contributed to taking the substances.
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. In order, to eliminate "all possible effects of suggestion, sensory stimulation and interest", Rivers ensured that the substances were disguised so that he could not ascertain, in any instance, whether he was taking a drug or a control substance. This was the first experiment of its kind to use this double-blind procedure. As a result of the importance attached to the study, Rivers was appointed in 1906 as Croonian Lecturer to the Royal College of Physicians.
In December 1897 Rivers's achievements were recognised by the University of Cambridge who honoured him with the degree of M.A. honoris causa and, in 1904 with the assistance of Professor James Ward, Rivers made a further mark on the world of psychological sciences, founding and subsequently editing the British Journal of Psychology.
Despite his many successes, Rivers was still a markedly reticent man in mixed company, hampered as he was by his stammer and innate shyness. In 1897, Langdon-Brown invited Rivers to come and address the Abernethian Society. The occasion was not an unqualified success. He chose "Fatigue" as his subject, and before he had finished his title was writ large on the faces of his audience. In the Cambridge physiological laboratory too he had to lecture to a large elementary class. He was rather nervous about it, and did not like it, his hesitation of speech made his style dry and he had not yet acquired the art of expressing his original ideas in an attractive form, except in private conversation.
Among two or three friends, however, the picture of Rivers is quite different. His conversations were full of interest and illumination; "he was always out to elicit the truth, entirely sincere, and disdainful of mere dialect." His insistence on veracity made him a formidable researcher, as Haddon puts it, "the keynote of Rivers was thoroughness. Keenness of thought and precision marked all his work." His research was distinguished by a fidelity to the demands of experimental method very rare in the realms which he was exploring and, although often overlooked, the work that Rivers did in this early period is of immense import as it formed the foundation of all that came later.
Torres Straits expedition
Rivers recognised in himself "the desire for change and novelty, which is one of the strongest aspects of my mental makeup" 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.
The turning point came in 1898 when Alfred Cort Haddon seduced "Rivers from the path of virtue... (for psychology then was a chaste science)... into that of anthropology:" He made Rivers first choice to head an expedition to the Torres Straits. Rivers's first reaction was to decline, but he soon agreed on learning that C. S. Myers and William McDougall, two of his best former students, would participate. The other members were Sidney Ray, C. G. Seligman, and a young Cambridge graduate named Anthony Wilkin, who was asked to accompany the expedition as photographer. In April 1898, the Europeans were transported with gear and apparatus to the Torres Straits. Rivers was said to pack only a small handbag of personal effects for such field trips.
From Thursday Island, several of the party found passage, soaked by rain and waves, on the deck of a crowded 47-foot ketch. In addition to sea sickness, Rivers had been badly sunburnt on his shins and for many days had been quite ill. On 5 May, in a bad storm nearing their first destination of Murray Island, the ship dragged anchor on the Barrier Reef and the expedition almost met disaster Later Rivers recalled the palliative effect of near shipwreck.