William Halse Rivers Rivers

One of the most fascinating men of his generation, W. H. R. Rivers was a British doctor and psychiatrist as well as a leading ethnologist. Immortalized as the hero of Pat Barker's award-winning Regeneration trilogy, Rivers was the clinician who, in the First World War, cared for the poet Siegfried Sassoon and other infantry officers injured on the western front. His researches into the borders of psychiatry, medicine and religion made him a prominent member of the British intelligentsia of the time, a friend of H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell. Part of his appeal lay in an extraordinary intellect, mixed with a very real interest in his fellow man. Medicine, Magic and Religion is a prime example of this. A social institution, it is one of Rivers's finest works. In it, Rivers introduced the then revolutionary idea that indigenous practices are indeed rational, when viewed in terms of religious beliefs.

The Fitzpatrick Lectures Delivered Before the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1915 and 1916

Medicine, Magic, and Religion

Sylvanus Griswold Morley

Carnegie Institution of Washington

Albert Ernest Jenks

Reports Upon the Present Condition and Future Needs of the Science of Anthropology

The History of Melanesian Society

This two-volume work from 1914 presents William Halse Rivers' theory of the diffusion of culture in the south-west Pacific. Volume Two details the many similarities and differences among the societies of Melanesia and the possible ways in which these contrasts could have arisen.

This illustrated book, published in 1906, was long regarded as a standard ethnography on a people in south-west India.

William Halse Rivers Rivers

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