William Halse Rivers Rivers

WHR Rivers

William Halse Rivers Rivers (born March 12, 1864 Chatham , † June 4, 1922 Cambridge ) was a British anthropologist , ethnologist , neurologist and psychiatrist , who was best known for his work with traumatized soldiers of the First World War . His best known patient was the poet Siegfried Sassoon . He also attracted attention for his participation in the expedition led by Alfred C. Haddon to explore the Torres Straits ( Torres Straits Expedition ) of 1898 and his anthropological work on clans and consanguinity .

Life

Rivers was the eldest son of Henry Frederick Rivers (1830-1911) and Elizabeth Hunt (1834-1897). His siblings were brother Charles Hay (1865-1939) and the sisters Ethel Marian (1867-1943) and Katharine Elizabeth (1871-1939). The family came from the British upper middle class, who had produced numerous Cambridge graduates and members of the British Navy , the most famous of whom were midshipmen Williams Rivers and his father Gunner Rivers, both serving on HMS Victory .

Rivers first attended a private preparatory school in Brighton and from 1877 to 1880 the Tonbridge School in Cambridge, where he stood out as a gifted student and received awards in ancient languages ​​and for his overall achievement.

In keeping with family tradition, Rivers should have studied at Cambridge University. However, since he contracted typhoid during his senior year at school , he was unable to apply for a scholarship and his family was unable to finance his studies at Cambridge.

So he enrolled Rivers at the University of London to study medicine and worked at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. The fact that he graduated in 1886 at the age of 22 makes him the youngest graduate of this course at the University of London to this day.

plant

In 1887 Rivers hired as a ship's doctor and went to North America and Japan , in 1888 he worked in a hospital in Chichester , in 1889 again in St. Bartholomew's, in 1890 in a private doctor's office and in 1891 at the National Hospital Queen Square, where he met the neurologist Henry Head got to know. At that time his interest in psychology developed. At the age of 24 he published his first research papers and became a member of the Neurological Society of London .

Rivers interrupted his work in England to travel to Germany, where he learned German and studied experimental psychology and philosophy in Jena . He was already giving lectures at the University of London in experimental psychology when he accepted a teaching position offered to him at Cambridge University in 1893. He prepared for this by working with Emil Kraepelin in Heidelberg the previous summer . Rivers particular pre-war research interest, which he was to teach at Cambridge, was in the sense organs; He worked as a researcher in particular on the sub-areas of color vision, optical illusions, noise reactions and perception processes. It was not until 1912 that Charles Samuel Myers built a research laboratory with money from his private fortune. In 1904, Rivers was a co-founder and co-editor of the British Journal of Psychology .

The Torres Strait Expedition

River's scientific reputation grew steadily. In 1898, Alfred Cort Haddon got him to take part in the research trip to Torres Strait as an anthropologist with Charles Samuel Myers and William McDougall, his former students who worked for him as his assistants . Rivers examined the color vision of the locals and found that it was no different from that of the Europeans. But he made a linguistically interesting observation, namely that the Torres Strait residents linguistically did not distinguish between the blue of the sky, the blue of the sea and the deepest darkness. Rivers also began to record genealogical connections , which showed clear differences in their groupings to the European classifications. In detail, the results of this research may seem out of date and inaccurate to us today, but this was the first time that anthropologists did not develop their findings on the basis of books. The journey was groundbreaking for anthropology . In 1900 Rivers was again involved in studies of color vision, in Egypt.

In 1907/08, Rivers traveled to the Solomon Islands and other islands in Polynesia for research with an ethnological focus , just as he traveled to Melanesia in 1914 , from where he returned to Europe in March 1915.

The First World War

Rivers worked in the Royal Medical Corps as a doctor at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh . In this hospital he treated soldiers whose ailments were called shell shock or war neurosis at the time and who, according to today's standards, are most likely to be classified as post- traumatic stress disorder . His treatment method was unusual for the time in two respects, because on the one hand, contrary to the prevailing thinking of the time, he saw in the sufferings of the soldiers a real illness and not cowardice and he also encouraged them to talk about their experiences in the war instead of enduring them and to be silent. He knew that he couldn't automatically spare his patients a return to military service, but didn't want to break their will. Rivers saw in the suffering of his patients the expression of the instinct for self-preservation of every living being and based his treatment on psychoanalysis , which he used as a method as one of the first doctors in Great Britain.

Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were his most prominent patients at Craiglockhart Hospital.

post war period

Rivers had given up his position at Cambridge University during the war and he only took on the specially created position of Praelector of Natural Science Studies , which he could fill with life at his own discretion. He agreed to run as the Labor Party candidate in the 1922 general election, but died before the election.

Individual evidence

1. ^ WHR Rivers: Psychology and Politics. Routledge publishing house, new edition 1999. ISBN 0-415-20955-2 , pp. 149 f. ( books.google.de ).
2. ^ Tonbridge School: Skinners' Day In: The Tonbridgian. October 1878, pp. 334-335.
3. ↑ LE Shore: WHR Rivers. In: The Eagle. 1922, pp. 2-12.
4. ↑ Richard Slobodin, WHR Rivers: Pioneer Anthropologist and Psychiatrist of the. "Ghost Road" Sutton Publishing, Strout 1997, ISBN 0-7509-1490-4 .
5. ^ WHR Rivers: Psychology and Politics. Routledge publishing house, new edition 1999m ISBN 0-415-20955-2 , p. 151 f. ( books.google.de ).
6. ^ Rivers, William Halse Rivers . In: John Archibald Venn (Ed.): Alumni Cantabrigienses . A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Part 2: From 1752 to 1900 , Volume 5 : Pace – Spyers . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1953, pp. 310 ( venn.lib.cam.ac.uk Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
7. ^ Guy Deutscher: Through the Language Glass. How Words Color your World. William Heinemann, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-434-01690-7 .
8. ↑ Keith Hart: The place of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits (CAETS) in the history of British social anthropology. In: Science as Culture. 1998 ( academia.edu ).
9. ^ WHR Rivers: History of Melanesian Society. 2 volumes. Cambridge, 1914.
10. ^ WHR Rivers: The Repression of War Experience The Lancet. February 2, 1918.