Richard Owen's Golgotha: Lancaster Castle and the Prisoner's Head that Rolled

In 1844 and 1845, Hood's Magazine published a series of Gothic stories under the pen name of 'Gideon Shaddoe'. Two of the series have since been shown to feature a rare collaboration between William Broderip and Richard Owen, then Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy at London's Royal College of Surgeons and later the founding superintendent of the British Museum (Natural History). Owen had served his surgical apprenticeship in Lancaster in the 1820s. This chapter explores the possibility that the second of these collaborations was based upon a real event from the early period of Owen's apprenticeship. I also discuss Richard Owen's early interest in human anatomy and racial craniology and how this influenced his lifelong comparative craniological research and collection in the context of nineteenth-century racial science.