Уильям Халс Риверс: Антрополог, психиатр және әскери дәрігер

English psychiatrist and anthropologist (1864–1922)

the British navy officer

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, so they could be returned to combat. 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 and his consequent seminal work on the subject of kinship.

Rivers had already formed a career in physiology and psychology. But now he moved more definitively into anthropology. He wanted a demographically small, fairly isolated people, comparable to the island societies of the Torres Strait, where he might be able to get genealogical data on each and every individual. The Todas in the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India, with their population then about 700 plus, suited Rivers's criteria. And they had specific features of social organization, such as polyandrous marriage and a bifurcation of their society into so called moieties that had interested historical evolutionists. Whether his fieldwork was initially so single minded is questionable, however, since at first Rivers looked at other local communities and studied their visual perception before fixing all his attention on the Todas. Rivers worked among the Todas for less than six months during 1901–02, communicating with his Toda informants only through interpreters and lodged in an Ootacamund hotel. Yet he assembled a stunning collection of data on the ritual and social lives of the Toda people. Almost all who have subsequently studied the Todas have been amazed at the richness and the accuracy of Rivers's data. His book The Todas, which came out in 1906, is still an outstanding contribution to Indian ethnography, "indispensable: still only to be supplemented rather than superseded", as Murray Emeneau wrote in 1971. And it is little wonder that so famous a champion of anthropological fieldwork as Dr Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) declared Rivers to be his "patron saint of field work". In the preface to this book Rivers wrote that his work was "not merely the record of the customs and beliefs of a people, but also the demonstration of anthropological method". That method is the collection of genealogical materials for the purpose of more fully investigating other aspects of social life, notably ritual. The first eleven chapters of The Todas represented in 1906 a novel approach to the presentation of ethnographic data, one that, under the influence of Malinowski, would later become a standard practice in British social anthropology. This is the analysis of a people's society and culture by presentation of a detailed description of a particularly significant institution. In the Toda case, it is the sacred dairy cult. But Rivers is unable to sustain this focus throughout the work, so after a brilliant opening, the book tails off somewhat. We get a good idea of the Toda dairies and the ideas of ritual purity that protect them; but then the author returns to the ready made categories of the day: gods, magic, kinship, clanship, crime and so on, and says no more about the dairies. Moreover, he failed to discover the existence of matrilineal clans alongside the patrilineal ones. A second, and more important, limitation of his study is its failure to view Toda society as a local and specialized variant of—as A. L. Kroeber wrote—"higher Indian culture". Rivers's book has been largely responsible for the view (now not infrequently held by educated Todas themselves) that these are a people quite distinct from other South Indians. When, in 1902, Rivers left the Nilgiri Hills and India too, he would never return. Moreover, after the publication of The Todas he wrote very little more about them.

Following his appointment at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Rivers published the results of his experimental treatment of patients at Craiglockhart in The Lancet, "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. Rivers' personal and complete theory on the origin of the "psycho neuroses", including the war neuroses, was not to be published until 1920 with the publication of Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho Neuroses. 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. and the Royal Anthropological Institute (1921–1922). He had been taken ill suddenly in his rooms at St John's on the evening of Friday 3 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", His loss prompted him to write two poignant poems about the man he had grown to love: "To A Very Wise Man" and "Revisitation".

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 the book as the only character to retain his factual name, giving him a position as a sort of demi god in Sassoon's semi fictitious memoirs. 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's 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 may 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 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 Melanesia; 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 persona". Rivers appears briefly in The God of the Hive, the tenth novel in the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series by mystery writer Laurie R. King, in which he is the author of a medical letter, written during the war, concerning one of that novel's characters. Rivers appears in Francois Smith's 2014 Afrikaans novel Kamphoer (The Camp Whore), based on a true story, as inspiration to the protagonist an Afrikaans girl who was raped by British soldiers during the Anglo Boer War in South Africa, for his treatment of soldiers by applying psychological methods and humane support to heal their psychological scars. Rivers' methodology also helped the protagonist, who became a psychiatric nurse herself, to overcome her trauma. In a twist of events, she treats one of the soldiers who had raped her some years earlier when she was a teenager.