ISO Seotional addresses. 



1877 to 1880 at Tonbridgfe School. Thence he had. hoped to proceed to 

 Cambridge; but a severe attack of enteric fever compelled him to take 

 a year's rest, and thus prevented him from competing for an entrance 

 scholarship at that University. He matriculated instead in the Univer- 

 sity of London, and entered St. Bartholomew's Hospital in 1882, 

 sharing the intention of one of his father's pupils of becoming an Army 

 doctor. This idea, however, he soon relinquished ; but, like his desire 

 to go to Cambridge, it was to be realised later in life.^ 



When he took his degree of Bachelor of Medicine in 1886 he was 

 accounted the youngest Bachelor ever known at his hospital. Two 

 years later he graduated as Doctoi' of Medicine, and he spent these two 

 and the two following years in resident appointments at Chichester 

 (1888) and at St. Bartholomew's (1889) hospitals, in a brief period of 

 private medical practice (1890), and in travelling as ship's sui'geon to 

 America and Japan (1887), the first of numerous subsequent voyages. 

 In 1891 he became house-physician at the National Hospital, Queen 

 Square, where he first made the acquaintance of Dr. Henry Head, 

 whose collaborator he was to be some twenty years later in one of the 

 most striking neurological experiments ever made. 



But before he began work at Queen Square, before he assisted 

 Horsley there in his then wonderful operations on the brain, before he 

 met Head fresh from his studies in Germany and enthusiastic over the 

 colour-vision work and novel physiological conceptions of Hering, 

 Rivers had already shown his interest in the study of the mind and the 

 nervous system. Thus, in 1888, when he was twenty-four years of age, 

 we find in the ,S7. Bartliolomeiv's Hospital Reports (vol. xxiv., pp. 249- 

 251) his first published paper on ' A Case of Spasm of the Muscles of 

 the Neck Causing Protrusion of the Head,' and in the following year, in 

 the same Reports (vol. xxv., pp. 279-280), an abstract of a paper read 

 by him before the Abernethian jSociety entitled ' Delirium and its 

 Allied Conditions.' At this early date he pointed out the analogies 

 between delirium and mania, protested against the use of narcotics in 

 delirium, and condemned the wide separation — too wide even to-day — 

 between diseases of the mind and diseases of the body. In 1891 and 

 in 1893 he read papers to the Abernethian Society, abstracts of which 

 appear in the St. Bartholomew's Hospital Reports (vol. xxvii., pp. 285- 

 286, vol. xxix., p. 350), on ' Hysteria ' and on ' Neurasthenia,' to 

 which his interests were to return so fruitfully during and after the 

 Great War. 



In 1892 he spent the spring and early summer at Jena, attending 

 the lectures of Eucken, Ziehen, Binswanger, and others. In a diary 

 kept by him during this visit to Germany the following sentence occurs : 

 ' I have during the last few weeks come to the conclusion that I should 

 go in for insanity when I return to England and work as much as 

 possible at psychology.' Accordinglj^, in the same year he became 

 Clinical Assistant at the Bethlem Royal Hospital, and in 1893 he 

 assisted G. H. Savage in his lectures on mental diseases at Guy's 



' For many of the above details of Rivers's early life and antecedents I am 

 indebted to his sister, Miss K. E. Rivers. 



