Britain
W. H. R. Rivers
1864–1922 Physician and anthropologist at Craiglockhart
William Halse Rivers Rivers was a physician, neurologist and anthropologist who had studied the Torres Strait Islanders before the war. At Craiglockhart War Hospital he treated officers by talking, encouraging them to remember and discuss their war experiences instead of suppressing them. His patients included Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and he appears as a character in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. Rivers believed the repression of fear was often more damaging than the fear, and that the emphasis on the stiff upper lip was making men sicker. His methods anticipated modern psychotherapy for trauma.