Richard Owen

English natural scientist

• Born: July 20, 1804; Lancaster, England
• Died: December 18, 1892; London, England

Nineteenth-century English anatomist, naturalist, and paleontologist Richard Owen was a controversial figure with an interest in numerous areas of science. He lectured widely on anatomy, catalogued fossils, and classified numerous extinct species. Owen was a prominent voice in the debate over evolution and successfully championed the establishment of the Natural History Museum.

Primary field: Biology

Specialties: Anatomy; evolutionary biology; paleontology; zoology

Early Life

Richard Owen was one of six children born into a moderately wealthy family. He was named after his father, Richard, a merchant who successfully traded in the West Indies. His mother was Catherine Parrin Owen, a well-educated, musically inclined woman of French Huguenot descent. Owen grew up speaking both French and English. He enrolled at Lancaster Grammar School in 1809, the same year his father died.

Owen left school at age fourteen to enlist in the Royal Navy for a two-year stint as midshipman. Upon his return, he became an indentured apprentice to a group of local surgeons and apothecaries: Leonard Dickson, Joseph Seed, and James Stockdale Harrison. As a surgical apprentice, Owen assisted with the autopsies and postmortem examinations of deceased prisoners from the nearby prison. During four years of service, he became skilled at dissection and developed a fascination for anatomy.

Building upon his experience, he enrolled in medical courses at the University of Edinburgh in 1824. Owen’s proficiency in anatomy was so advanced that one of his professors wrote glowingly of his abilities to John Abernethy, president of the Royal College of Surgeons and chief surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. By 1825, Owen was in London working as Abernethy’s assistant, preparing cadaver dissections for the doctor’s anatomical demonstrations. The following year, Owen passed the required medical exams and became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Life’s Work

It was through Dr. Abernethy that Owen gained the post that launched his career. In 1827, he was named assistant curator at the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. Working under museum conservator (and his future father-in-law) William Clift, Owen was put in charge of the Hunterian Collection, a vast assemblage of human and animal specimens that Scottish surgeon-scientist John Hunter had gathered during his lifetime. The British government had purchased the collection in 1799 for 15,000 pounds. Owen was tasked with cataloging each piece in the collection.

Though Owen had set up a medical private practice in London, he soon abandoned medicine in favor of his work at the museum. By 1830, in the process of becoming an expert on comparative anatomy, he had identified and classified all 13,000 Hunterian specimens. Owen published an illustrated catalogue of the collection—the first of some 600 written works he authored—and was elected to the Zoological Society of London as the organization’s youngest member. In the same year, he met touring French anatomist and paleontology pioneer Georges Cuvier. Owen was invited to Paris, where he performed demonstrative dissections at the national natural history museum.

Owen’s reputation and influence grew throughout the 1830s. He was granted permission to perform necropsies on animals that had died at the Zoological Society’s garden exhibits of living creatures. In 1832, he published Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus, still considered one of the best studies of the cephalopod, a living fossil. The following year he founded the scholarly journal, Zoological Magazine. In 1834, Owen was named a Fellow of the Royal Society. After a long courtship, Owen married his superior’s only daughter, Caroline Amelia Clift, in 1835. The couple had one son, William, who died by suicide as an adult. In 1836, Owen was named Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, a post he would hold for twenty years. He next embarked on a series of public lectures that helped popularize scientific endeavor. He was also appointed to examine the fossils that English naturalist Charles Darwin brought back from his first voyage on the Beagle. In recognition of his many accomplishments, the Geological Society of London in 1838 bestowed on Owen its highest award, the Wollaston Medal, one of dozens of honors he would receive during his lifetime.

In 1842, the year he became joint conservator of the Hunterian Museum, Owen refused an offer of knighthood. By now a favorite of royalty and high society, he served for several years on government commissions studying the health and environment of the population of London. In 1847, he was selected to explore the anatomy of the gorilla, a recently discovered species of ape. When William Clift died in 1849, Owen became sole conservator at the Royal College of Surgeons Museum. Chosen to help plan London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, Owen commissioned sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to create the world’s first life-size models of extinct creatures for the Crystal Palace. The models, though somewhat inaccurate, can still be seen.

In 1856, Owen accepted the newly created position as superintendent of the natural history department at the British Museum, a post he retained until his retirement in 1884. As superintendent, he published dozens of papers on specimens from the collection and served from 1859 to 1861 as professor of physiology at the Royal Institution. Owen also tutored the children of Queen Victoria in natural science and was the primary dissector and preserver of animals—including giraffes, rhinos, and elephants—that died at the London Zoo. Owen’s wife, Caroline, died in 1873.

A significant portion of Owen’s energies during the last half of his life was spent in his prolonged campaign for a national museum of natural history that would be separate from the British Museum. His efforts were fruitful: funds were allocated and a new building in South Kensington was constructed for the British Museum of Natural History (later renamed the Natural History Museum), which opened to the public in 1881. For his lifetime achievements, Owen was knighted in 1884. He spent his remaining years in quiet retirement, living on a pension in a London residence granted to him by Queen Victoria, before dying at age eighty-eight.

Impact

Despite the numerous accomplishments recorded during his fifty-year career—multiple publications, prestigious appointments, numerous awards, and widespread acclaim in recognition of his unparalleled expertise in comparative anatomy—Owen’s reputation suffered a major blow in the 1860s from which he never fully recovered.

Not everyone had admired Owen during his rise to fame. As popular as his public lectures had been, his written works were typically dense, complex treatises, full of jargon that only fellow scientists were capable of unraveling. Contemporaries hinted at his vanity, arrogance, and his refusal of criticism. He was also disliked for currying favor with the powerful, and for his habit of claiming the scientific work of other colleagues as his own. In the mid-1840s, the Zoological Society and the Royal Society had expelled Owen after revelations that he had plagiarized a prize-winning paper. Owen was able to weather the storm, however, and remain a member of each organization.

In 1859, evolutionary theories were much discussed, following the publication of Darwin’s groundbreaking On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection. Owen, who had written about evolution for two decades, and whose contradictory theories on the subject were constantly in transition, made the mistake of coming out against Darwin’s conclusions. In a long, convoluted, thinly disguised unsigned review, Owen savaged the book while anonymously praising his own work, which backed the prevailing orthodox view of species development as divinely inspired creations that filled evolutionary niches. The review shattered the previously amicable relationship between Darwin and Owen and precipitated a ten-year dispute between Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley, a pugnacious Darwin supporter. When the smoke cleared, Huxley had decisively trounced Owen and driven him out of the limelight. It was only with the establishment of his greatest legacy, the Natural History Museum, that Owen’s name achieved a measure of redemption within the scientific community.

Bibliography

Cosans, Christopher E. Owen’s Ape and Darwin’s Bulldog: Beyond Darwinism and Creationism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. Print. Provides the background to the evolutionary controversy that raged during the nineteenth century before culminating in the bitter clash between Richard Owen and Thomas Huxley over Darwin’s theories.

Owen, Richard, and Ronald Amundson (ed.). On the Nature of Limbs: A Discourse. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Print. Reprint of a work first published in 1849 that introduces Owen’s still-valid concept of homology; features drawings and contemporary essays.

Rupke, Nicolaas A. Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Print. Illustrated biography of the naturalist that highlights Owen’s accomplishments while illuminating the machinations of the Victorian scientific community in which he functioned.