Thomas Bowdler, LRCP, FRS (; 11 July 1754 – 24 February 1825) was an English physician known for publishing The Family Shakespeare, an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's plays edited by his sister Henrietta Maria Bowdler. They sought a version they saw as more appropriate than the original for 19th-century women and children. Bowdler also published works reflecting an interested knowledge of continental Europe. His last work was an expurgation of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published posthumously in 1826 under the supervision of his nephew and biographer, Thomas Bowdler the Younger. The term bowdlerise or bowdlerize links the name with expurgation or omission of elements deemed unsuited to children, in literature and films and on television. Biography Thomas Bowdler was born in Box, near Bath, Somerset, the youngest son of the six children of Thomas Bowdler (c. 1719–1785), a banker of substantial fortune, and his wife, Elizabeth, née Cotton (d. 1797), the daughter of Sir John Cotton, 6th Baronet of Conington, Huntingdonshire. Bowdler studied medicine at the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, where he received his degree in 1776, graduating with a thesis on intermittent fevers.<ref name=bmj>Poynter, F. N. L. "Thomas Bowdler", The British Medical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 4879, 10 July 1954, pp. 97–98.</ref> He then spent four years travelling in continental Europe, visiting Germany, Hungary, Italy, Sicily and Portugal. In 1781 he caught a fever in Lisbon from a young friend whom he was attending through a fatal illness. He returned to England in broken health and with a strong aversion to the medical profession. In 1781 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians (LRCP), but he did not continue to practise medicine. He devoted himself instead to the cause of prison reform. Bowdler was a strong chess player and once played eight recorded games against the best chess player of the time, François-André Danican Philidor, who was so confident of his superiority that he played with several handicaps. Bowdler won twice, lost three times, and drew three times. The Bowdler Attack is named after him. Bowdler's first published work was Letters Written in Holland in the Months of September and October 1787 (1788), giving an eye-witness account of the Patriots' uprising. In 1800 Bowdler took a lease on a country estate at St Boniface, on the Isle of Wight,