W. H. R. Rivers

William Halse Rivers Rivers was an English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist, born in Chatham, Kent, in 1864. He led the 1898 expedition to the Torres Strait Islands, which helped establish empirical fieldwork as the basis of British anthropology, and his 1906 monograph The Todas demonstrated new methods of kinship-focused ethnography, followed by History of Melanesian Society (1914). During the First World War he treated officers suffering from shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital, developing an influential talking-cure approach to war neuroses that he set out in Instinct and the Unconscious (1920); his most famous patient was the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, with whom he remained close until his death. He held positions as a lecturer in experimental psychology at Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College. He died in Cambridge in 1922.