W. H. R. Rivers

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. His son Midshipman Rivers, who claimed to be "the man who shot the man who fatally wounded Lord Nelson", , Kent, where Henry Rivers was curate from 1880 to 1889 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. The Hunts, like the Rivers family, were established with naval and Church of England connections. 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. James Hunt was an exuberant character, giving to each of his ventures his boundless energy and self-confidence. 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. Hunt's efforts were integral to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) accepting anthropology in 1866 as a discipline. 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. 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). where Rivers and his brother Charles were day-boys William, known as "Willie" throughout his childhood, 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. 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. 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. Rivers was set to follow family tradition and take his University of Cambridge entrance exam, possibly with the aim of studying classics. 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, 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. 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 interest in the physiology of the nervous system and in "the mind", that is, in sensory phenomena and mental states, 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 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. 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." 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. 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. 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. He made Rivers first choice to head an expedition to the Torres Straits. When the ketch dropped anchor, Rivers and Ray were at first too ill to go ashore. However the others set up a surgery to treat the native islanders and Rivers, lying in bed next-door tested the patients for colour vision: Haddon's diary noted "He is getting some interesting results." In the course of his examinations of the visual acuity of the natives, Rivers showed that colour-blindness did not exist or was very rare, but that the colour vision of Papuans was not the same type as that of Europeans; they possessed no word for blue, and an intelligent native found nothing unnatural in applying the same name to the brilliant blue sea or sky and to the deepest black. "Moreover", Head goes on to state in Rivers's obituary notice, he was able to explode the old fallacy that the 'noble savage' was endowed with powers of vision far exceeding that of civilised natives. Errors of refraction are, it is true, less common, especially myopia. But, altogether the feats of the Torres Straits islanders equalled those reported by travellers from other parts of the world, they were due to the power of attending to minute details in familiar and strictly limited surrounding, and not to supernormal visual acuity. However, these simple tables soon took on a new perspective. It was at once evident to Rivers that the names applied to the various forms of blood relationship did not correspond to those used by Europeans, but belonged to what is known as a 'classificatory system'; a man's 'brothers' or 'sisters' might include individuals we should call cousins and the key to this nomenclature is to be found in forms of social organisation especially in varieties of the institution of marriage. Both Rivers and Haddon were serious about their work but at the same time they were imbued with a keen sense of humour and fun. Haddon's diary from Tuesday 16 August reads thus: Our friends and acquaintances would often be very much amused if they could see us at some of our occupations and I am afraid these would sometimes give occasion to the enemy to blaspheme – so trivial would they appear ... for example one week we were mad on cat's cradle – at least Rivers, Ray and I were – McDougall soon fell victim and even Myers eventually succumbed. and they are also credited as inventing a system of nomenclature that enabled them to be able to schematise the steps required and teach a variety of string tricks to European audiences. Todas 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 organisation, 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. During this time, he assembled a collection of data on the ritual and social lives of the Toda people. In 1906, he published his findings in his book The Todas. 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 specialised 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. =="A Human Experiment in Nerve Division"==

Upon his return to England from the Torres Strait, Rivers became aware of a series of experiments being conducted by his old friend Henry Head in conjunction with James Sherren, a surgeon at the London Hospital where they both worked. It quickly became clear to Rivers, looking in on the experiment from a psycho-physical aspect, that the only way accurate results could be obtained from introspection on behalf of the patient is if the subject under investigation was himself a trained observer, sufficiently discriminative to realise if his introspection was being prejudiced by external irrelevancies or moulded by the form of the experimenter's questions, and sufficiently detached to lead a life of detachment throughout the entire course of the tests. it is at this point that the experiment takes on an almost farcical aspect to the casual reader. From 1908 until the outbreak of the war Rivers was mainly preoccupied with ethnological and sociological problems. Already he had relinquished his official post as lecturer in Experimental Psychology in favour of Charles Samuel Myers, and now held only a lectureship on the physiology of the special senses. By degrees he became more absorbed in anthropological research. But though he was now an ethnologist rather than a psychologist he always maintained that what was of value in his work was due directly to his training in the psychological laboratory. In the laboratory he had learnt the importance of exact method; in the field he now gained vigour and vitality by his constant contact with the actual daily behaviour of human beings. During 1907–8 Rivers travelled to the Solomon Islands, and other areas of Melanesia and Polynesia. His two-volume History of Melanesian Society (1914), which he dedicated to St Johns, presented a diffusionist thesis for the development of culture in the south-west Pacific. 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. ==Great War==

When Rivers returned to England in spring 1915, he had trouble at first finding a place for himself in the war effort. As such, by the time Rivers was assigned to Maghull War Hospital, it was known as the "centre for abnormal psychology", and many of its physicians were employing techniques such as dream interpretation, psychoanalysis and hypnosis to treat shell shock, also known as the war neuroses. After about a year of service at Maghull War Hospital, Rivers was appointed a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and his two youthful dreams—to be an army doctor and to "go in for insanity"—were realised when he was transferred to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, Scotland in order to help "clean house" following a scandal. It is on this belief regarding the origins of the war neuroses that he formed his "talking cure". Rivers' "talking cure" was primarily based on the ancient belief of catharsis: the idea that bringing repressed memories into the light of consciousness rids memories and thoughts of their power. Rivers' autognosis consisted of two parts. The first part included "re-education", or educating the patient about the basics of psychology and physiology. River's method also consisted of helping a soldier comprehend that the illness he was experiencing was not "strange" nor permanent. Furthermore, Rivers encouraged his patients to express their emotions in a time when society encouraged men to keep a "stiff upper-lip". River's method, and his deep concern for every individual he treated, made him famous among his clients. Both Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves wrote highly of him during this time. For Rivers, there was a considerable dilemma involved in "curing" his patients simply in order that they could be sent back to the Western Front to die. Rivers's feelings of guilt are clearly portrayed both in fiction and in fact. Through Pat Barker's novels and in Rivers's works (particularly Conflict and Dream) we get a sense of the turmoil the doctor went through. As Sassoon wrote in a letter to Robert Graves (24 July 1918): Rivers did not wish to "break" his patients, but at the same time he knew that it was their duty to return to the front and his duty to send them. There is also an implication (given the pun on Rivers's name along with other factors) that Rivers was more to Sassoon than just a friend. Sassoon called him "father confessor", a point that Jean Moorcroft Wilson picks up on in her biography of Sassoon; however, Rivers's tight morals would have probably prevented a closer relationship from progressing: Not only Sassoon, but his patients as a whole, loved him and his colleague Frederic Bartlett wrote of him Sassoon described Rivers's bedside manner in his letter to Graves, written as he lay in hospital after being shot (a head wound that he had hoped would kill him – he was bitterly disappointed when it did not): Rivers was well known for his compassionate, effective and pioneering treatments; as Sassoon's testimony reveals, he treated his patients very much as individuals. Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses Following his appointment at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Rivers published the results of his experimental treatment of patients 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. River's theory of the neuroses incorporates everything he had researched up until this point and was designed to "consider the general biological function of the process by which experience passes into the region of the unconscious". In attempting to construct such an umbrella theory, Rivers accepted that the unconscious exists and that the contents of the unconscious are entirely inaccessible to a person except through the processes of hypnosis, dreaming, or psychoanalysis. Rivers further defined the unconscious as a repository of instincts and associated experiences (i.e. memories) which are painful or not useful to the organism. "Instincts", in this regard, are actions which an organism performs without learning and which are executed without the mediating influence of thought. As such, the action has an "all-or-none" aspect to it: it either does not occur at all or it occurs with all of its force. To this end, Rivers included the protopathic sensations, mass-reflex actions (as observed in spinal-cord injury patients), and basic emotions (i.e. anger, fear) as instincts. Rivers further asserted that all painful or un-useful instincts are naturally kept out of conscious awareness (i.e. in the unconscious) by suppression. Suppression—in this view—is a natural and "unwitting" (unintentional) method for removing painful instincts from consciousness and confining them in the unconscious. Neuroses, therefore, develop when something in the natural process of suppression is disrupted so that a suppressed instinct and its associated emotion are released from the unconscious. Rivers cites two possible reasons for the "escape" of such instincts from the unconscious: either the instinct became too strong to contain, or the normal reserves which typically suppress it were weakened. It is important to note, however, that the etiology of war neuroses is not simply the escape of instincts from the unconscious and the ensuing conflict. More often than not, Rivers believed that the way in which such conflict is resolved (or is attempted to be resolved) also greatly influences the manifestation of the neuroses. In regards to the war neuroses, Rivers believed that the disease's manifestation stems from the escape of the "self-preservation" or "danger instincts" from the unconscious. These "danger instincts", as Rivers conceives of them, include at least five types of reflexive reactions to danger: (i) fear as manifested by flight, (ii) aggression as manifested by fighting, (iii) the suppression of all emotion in order to complete complex tasks which leads to safety, (iv) terror as manifested by immobility, and (v) the suppression of all physical resources as manifested by collapsing. Typically, reactions i, ii, iv, and v are suppressed so that humans can remain calm in the face of fear and can complete complex actions which lead to safety. When all five "self-preservation" instincts are repeatedly aroused for long periods of time, such as during exposure to war, the instincts gain power and eventually "escape" from the unconscious. As such, the emotions of fear, aggression, and terror arise into consciousness, as do their associated responses. These emotions and their suggested actions create great conflict in the consciousness, however: "fear" and "terror" are far from socially acceptable in war. In order to deal with the conflict created by the "escaped" instincts, Rivers posited that the mind must do something to provide immediate relief. It is this attempt to achieve relief from mental conflicts that leads to war neuroses. For example, Rivers proposed that officers and soldiers who have night terrors do so because they are trying to wittingly repress emotions and their associated instincts back into the unconscious. Repression, according to Rivers, is never adequate for removing conflict; it is only fruitful when a person can exert a conscious effort to do so. As a result, the repressed instincts, along with their associated emotions and memories, seep into consciousness when soldiers are sleeping. The result is night terrors. In an alternative scenario, wartime hysteria can be explained as the body's suppression of normal physiological functioning in order to avoid the scenario which activates the danger instincts and releases the associated emotion of fear into consciousness. Hysterical soldiers often presented with symptoms of paralysis and diminished or lost sensory capacities, even in the absence of anxiety or depression. These physiological symptoms, although distressing in themselves, make it impossible for a soldier to be returned to the front line. Thus, the body compensates for its inability to suppress the danger instincts in the face of war by making it so that the soldier must avoid warfare altogether. Overall, Rivers attributed the neuroses to both (i) the escape of painful instincts and their associated emotions from the unconscious and (ii) the mind's unsuccessful efforts to force such instincts and their emotions back into the conscious. While Rivers' theory contains some Freudian elements, it is not simply a restatement of psychoanalytic theory; Rivers' theory of the neuroses draws heavily on the neurological observations and conclusions Rivers and Henry Head drew from their work on nerve regeneration. In retrospect, Rivers' particular method of treating the war neuroses and his theory of the origin of neuroses—while pioneering in their day—have failed to leave a huge mark on the history of psychology. However, the general contributions of psychiatrists treating war neuroses, in combination with the overwhelming prevalence of the neuroses during the Great War, led to a revolution in the British perspective of mental illness and its treatment. ==Post war==

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". 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). His loss prompted him to write two poignant poems about the man he had grown to love: "To A Very Wise Man" and "Revisitation". ==Others' opinions of Rivers==

In the poem The Red Ribbon Dream, written by Robert Graves not long after Rivers's death, he touches on the peace and security he felt in Rivers's 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. There is a reference that indicates that these lines were written by Charles Elliot Fox, There is also a Rivers Memorial Medal, founded in 1923, which is rewarded each year to an anthropologist who has made a significant impact in his or her field. Appropriately, Haddon was the first to receive this award in 1924. ==In fiction==

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 (published in English as The Camp Whore), based on a true story during the Anglo-Boer War . The protagonist, a teenage Afrikaans girl, is raped by British soldiers; Rivers offers her inspiration, through his humane supportive treatment of soldiers. In adulthood, she becomes a psychiatric nurse to overcome her own trauma. In a twist of events, she treats one of the soldiers who had attacked her years earlier. Rivers appears in the film Benediction, played by Ben Daniels. ==Bibliography==