Thomas Bowdler

Thomas Bowdler LRCP FRS
Title page of Bowdler's best-known work
Born	11 July 1754 Bath, Somerset, England
Died	24 February 1825(1825-02-24) (aged 70) Swansea, Wales
Occupation(s)	Physician, editor
Notable work	The Family Shakspeare (1807)

Thomas Bowdler, LRCP, FRS (/ˈbaʊdlər/; 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. The two 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. From his name derives the eponym verb bowdlerise or bowdlerize, meaning to expurgate or to censor something through the omission of elements deemed unsuited to children in literature and films and on television.^[1]