Educated at St Bartholomew's Hospital. At the time of his death he was Surgeon to the Sussex County Hospital and to the Deaf and Dumb Institute, and Consulting Surgeon to the Brighton and Sussex Eye Infirmary. He practised at 24 Cannon Place, Brighton, in partnership with G E Pocock, and died on October 18th, 1871. The following interesting account of the conditions and practice at the Sussex County Hospital in Lowden day is quoted in full from Sussex in Bygone Days, by Nathaniel Paine Blaker, MRCS, of Brighton:- "If the memory of things which happened fifty years ago can be relied on, medicine and surgery and the management of patients must have been very primitive and crude. The walls of the wards were whitewashed, there was no attempt at ornamentation, the floors were of deal boards with wide interspaces, and these were occasionally scrubbed. The food was good and stimulants were prescribed freely. The beds were very close, with small cubic space for each. Both nurse and patients conspired to keep the windows closed, especially at night, night air being considered injurious. The smell was, consequently, sickening, and erysipelas and pyaemia were almost always present in a greater or less degree. Arteries were secured with waxed silk ligatures, one end of which was cut short and the other left hanging out of the wound; when they separated at about the ninth or tenth day, there was frequently secondary haemorrhage, half-healed stumps were torn open, and the almost impossible task of securing a vessel in the midst of granulations, which bled on the slightest touch, was attempted. Wounds were usually dressed with wet lint, which constantly from neglect (it was almost impossible to keep it wet) became dry; but frequently stumps, even on the second day, were poulticed, a copious excretion of yellow pus, pus laudabile, being thought to prevent erysipelas. There were about three or four sponges in the ward, which were used for all patients one after another, almost without washing. When stumps were dressed, pus used to flow out by the ounce through the fingers of the man who supported the flaps. Fractures were treated much as now, with splints, but sloughs and bedsores were much more common. Anaesthetics were not well understood and were looked upon rather with dread, and I well recollect seeing a thigh amputated without anaesthetic. The patient, a man from Rottingdean, was brought in with comminuted fracture of the thigh; it did badly, and secondary amputation was decided on at a consultation. It was also decided not to use chloroform (ether was then never used) for fear of increasing shock! Mr Lowdell tried to amputate the thigh by the flap operation, but the knife, which transfixed the limb, caught against a fragment of bone. Never shall I forget the agonized cry of the poor man - 'Please cut me through, Doctor, pray cut me through.' The limb was eventually taken off by cutting the flaps from without inwards, but the patient died next day. "Cupping was so constantly prescribed, especially for pain in the back, that two or three out-patients were occasionally seated in chairs, in a row, and all cupped at the same time, the cupping glasses being taken off and replaced in rotation."