Siegfried Sassoon

William Halse Rivers Rivers, FRCP, FRS, – 4 June 1922 was an English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist, best known for his work with shell-shocked soldiers during World War I. Rivers's most famous patient was the poet Siegfried Sassoon. He is also famous for his... participation in the Torres Straits expedition of 1898, and his consequent seminal work on the subject of kinship. Rivers was born in 1864 at Constitution Hill, Chatham, Kent, son of Elizabeth 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, the most famous of which were Midshipman William Rivers and his father Gunner Rivers who both served aboard HMS Victory. The senior Rivers, also called William, was the master gunner aboard The Victory and it is thanks to his commonplace book that many of the thoughts of the sailors aboard Nelson's flagship are preserved.
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Sir Henry Head, FRS was an English neurologist who conducted pioneering work into the somatosensory system and sensory nerves. Much of this work was conducted on himself, in collaboration with the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, by severing and reconnecting sensory nerves and mapping how sensation... returned over time. Head-Holmes syndrome and Head-Riddoch syndrome are named after him. Henry Head was born on 4 August 1861 at number 6, Park Road, Stoke Newington , as the eldest son of Henry Head and his wife Hester Beck and one of eleven children. 'Harry', as he was called throughout his childhood, was of strong Quaker roots and Head once described his parents as being "the centre of a multitude of friends and relations." Head's father was an insurance broker for Lloyd's Bank and the third son of Jeremiah Head, formerly the Mayor of Ipswich, and Mary Howard. His mother was the daughter of Richard Beck, who had been a partner of his uncle J.J Lister in a wine business in London, and his wife Rachel.
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Henry Vaughan was a Welsh physician and metaphysical poet. Vaughan and his twin brother the hermetic philosopher and alchemist Thomas Vaughan, were the sons of Thomas Vaughan and his wife Denise of 'Trenewydd', Newton, in Brecknockshire, Wales. Their grandfather, William, was the owner of... Tretower Court. Vaughan spent most of his life in the village of Llansantffraed, near Brecon, where he is also buried. Both Henry and his twin Thomas were schooled locally by the rector of Llangattock , the Rev. Matthew Herbert. This occupied six years preceding their attendance at Jesus College, Oxford, England in 1638. However, around 1640, Vaughan's family influenced him to pursue a career in law to the abandonment of an Oxford degree. As the Civil War developed, he was recalled home from London, initially to serve as a secretary to Sir Marmaduke Lloyd, a chief justice on the Brecknockshire circuit and staunch royalist. Military service interrupted his study of the law and, upon his return, Vaughan began to practise medicine.
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Sir Edmund William Gosse CB was an English poet, author and critic; the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes. Edmund Gosse's father was a naturalist and his mother an illustrator who published a number of books of poetry. Both were deeply committed to a small Protestant sect, the Plymouth... Brethren. His childhood was initially happy as they spent their summers in Devon where his father was developing the ideas which gave rise to the craze for the marine aquarium. After his mother died of breast cancer when he was eight and they moved to Devon, his life with his father became increasingly strained by his father's expectations that he should follow in his religious tradition. Gosse was sent to a boarding school where he began to develop his own interests in literature. His father married in 1860 the deeply religious Quaker spinster Eliza Brightwen , whose brother Thomas tried to encourage Edmund to become a banker. He later gave an account of his childhood in the book Father and Son which has been described as the first psychological biography.
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