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
Rivers was born in 1864 at Constitution Hill, Chatham, Kent son of Elizabeth Hunt (1834-1897) and Henry Frederick Rivers (1830–1911), an Anglican priest and speech therapist who treated Lewis Carroll among others..

Early life
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:
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:
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.

Life as a Ship's Surgeon
Back in England, Rivers became house surgeon at Chichester Infirmary (1887–9) and house physician at St Bartholomew's (1889–90)..

Beginnings of Psychological Career
In addition to his psychological work, Rivers joined the university's expedition to the Torres Strait Islands in 1898, organised by his close friend Alfred Cort 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 Despite his love of adventure and his obvious intellect, Rivers was still an extremely shy young man at this point:
(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)

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

Pre-War Psychological Work
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.
.

World War One
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" 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].

Post War

Others' Opinions of Rivers
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., missionary and ethnographer friend of Rivers.

Poetry
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:
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:
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.

Published Works
(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'.