October y, 192: 



NA TURE 



48; 



In 1903, the year after his return from the Todas, 

 and the year of his election to a Fellowship at St. John's 

 College, Rivers began an investigation, continued for 

 five years, with Dr. Henry Head," in which the latter, 

 certain sensory nerves of whose arm had been experi- 

 mentally divided, acted as subject, and Rivers acted 

 as experimenter, applying various stimuli to the arm 

 and recording the phenomena of returning cutaneous 

 sensibility. The exact interpretation of this " Human 

 Experiment in Nerve Division," published at length in 

 1908 {Brain, vol. xxxi.. pp. 323-450), has been dis- 

 puted by subsequent workers, whose divergent results, 

 however, are at least partly due to their employment 

 of different methods of procedure. Head's experiment 

 has never been identically repeated, and until this has 

 been done we are probably safe in trusting to the results 

 reached by the imaginative genius and the cautious 

 critical insight of this rare combination of investigators. 



While working upon Head's arm, Rivers's indomit- 

 able activity led him to simultaneous occupation 

 in other fields. In 1904 he assisted Prof. James 

 "Ward to found and to edit the British Journal of 

 Psychology, and in that year he also received an in- 

 vitation to deliver the Croonian Lectures in 1906 at 

 the Royal College of Physicians, of which in 1899 he 

 had been elected a Fellow. The study of drug effects 

 had long interested him. So, reverting to the work 

 he had done under Krapelin many years previously, he 

 chose as his subject for the Croonian Lectures, " The 

 Influence of Alcohol and other Drugs on Fatigue " 

 (Arnold, 1908). But although he utilised Krapelin's 

 ergograph and many of Krapelin's methods, Rivers's 

 jlair for discovering previous " faulty methods of 

 investigation " and his devotion to scientific methods 

 and accuracy could not fail to advance the subject. 

 Of no one may it be more truly said than of him, — 

 nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. He felt instinctively that 

 many of the supposed effects of alcohol were really due 

 to the suggestion, interest, excitement or sensory 

 stimulation accompanying the taking of the drug. 

 Accordingly he disguised the drug, and prepared a 

 control mixture which was indistinguishable from it. 

 On certain days the drug mixture was taken, on other 

 days the control mixture was taken, the subject never 

 knowing which he was drinking. He found that the 

 sudden cessation of all tea and coffee necessary for the 

 study of the effects of caffeine induced a loss of energy, 

 and that other mental disturbance might occur through 

 giving up all forms of alcoholic drink. Therefore most 

 of his experiments were carried out more than twelve 

 months after the taking of these drinks had been 

 discontinued. Instead of recording a single ergogram 

 Rivers took several sets of ergograms each day, each 

 set consisting usually of six ergograms taken at intervals 

 of two minutes, and separated from the next set by an 

 interval of thirty or sixty minutes. He arranged that 

 the drug mixture or the control mixture should be taken 

 after obtaining the first set of ergograms, which served 

 as a standard wherewith subsequent sets on the same 

 day might be compared. He worked with Mr. Webber 

 on alcohol and caffeine, and was followed by the similar 

 work of Dr. P. C. V. Jones in 1908 on strychnine, and 

 of Dr. J. G. Slade in 1909 on Liebig extract. 



With these vast improvements in method Rivers 

 failed to confirm the conclusions of nearly all earlier 



NO. 2762, VOL. I 10] 



investigators on the effects of from 5 to 20 c.c. of 

 absolute alcohol on muscular work. His results with 

 these doses, alike for muscular and mental work, were 

 mainly negative, and indeed with larger doses (40 c.i .) 

 were variable and inconclusive ; although an equivalent 

 quantity of whisky gave an immediate increase of 

 muscular work — a result which strongly suggests the 

 influence of sensory stimulation rather than the direct 

 effect of the drug on the central nervous system or on 

 the muscular tissues. Rivers concluded that alcohol 

 may in some conditions favourably act on muscular 

 work by increasing pleasurable emotion and by dulling 

 sensations of fatigue, but that probably its most 

 important effect is to depress higher control, thus 

 tending to increase muscular and to diminish mental 

 efficiency. 



From the concluding passages of these Croonian 

 Lectures the following sentences may be aptly cited : 

 " The branch of psychology in which I am chiefly 

 interested is that to which the name of individual 

 psychology is usually given. It is that branch of 

 psychology which deals with the differences in the 

 mental constitutions of different peoples, and by an 

 extension of the term to the differences which char- 

 acterise the members of different races. . . . These 

 experiments leave little doubt that variations in the 

 actions of drugs on different persons may have their 

 basis in deep-seated physiological variations, and I 

 believe that the study of these variations of suscepti- 

 bility may do more than perhaps any other line of work 

 to enable us to understand the nature of temperament 

 and the relation between the mental and physical 

 characters which form its two aspects." Throughout 

 his life Rivers was steadfast to this biological stand- 

 point, correlating the psychological with the physio- 

 logical, and hoping to discover different mental levels 

 corresponding to different neural levels. 



Now we approach the last phase of Rivers's psycho- 

 logical work, the outcome of his war experiences. In 

 1907 he had given up his University teaching in ex- 

 perimental psychology ; for six years before the war 

 he had published nothing of psychological or physio- 

 logical interest. This was a period in which Rivers 

 devoted himself wholly to the ethnology and sociology 

 of primitive peoples. The outbreak of war found him 

 for the second time visiting Melanesia for ethnological 

 field work. Failing at first to get war work on his 

 return to England, Rivers set himself to prepare the 

 Fitzpatrick Lectures on " Medicine, Magic and Re- 

 ligion," which he had been invited to deliver to the 

 Royal College of Physicians of London in 1915 and 

 1916. In 1915 his psychological and ethnological 

 researches were recognised by the award to him of a 

 Royal Medal by the Royal Society, of which he had 

 been elected a Fellow in 1908. In July 1915 he went 

 as medical officer to the Maghull War Hospital, near 

 Liverpool, and in 1916 to the Craiglockhart War 

 Hospital, Edinburgh, receiving a commission in the 

 R.A.M.C. In these hospitals he began the work on the 

 psychoneuroses that led him to his studies of the un- 

 conscious and of dreams, which resulted in his well- 

 known book, " Instinct and the Unconscious," and in 

 a practically completed volume on " Conflict and 

 Dream," which is to be published posthumously. 

 From 191 7 he acted as consulting psychologist to the 



