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Astley Cooper’s Illustrations of the Diseases of the Breast 1768-1841. Baronet FRS apprenticeship. He went year by year to Hunter’s course as the lectures were not repetitions, being constantly added to and modified, in parallel with Hunter’s studies and experiments. Cooper once asked Hunter, had he not the year before, stated an opinion on some point, directly opposite to the one, he had just put forward. John Hunter replied: “Very likely I did; I hope I grow wiser every year!”
Astley Cooper was the son of a country clergyman; his father was Rector at Brooke in Norfolk. Born on 23 August 1768, Astley was the fourth son and sixth child, to be followed by one more son and three more daughters. His mother, a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton, was a talented and charming woman: his paternal grandfather was a surgeon at Norwich and his uncle, William Cooper, Senior Surgeon to Guy’s Hospital. Astley was no scholar and in fact did not go away to school, receiving lessons at home from his parents and the village schoolmaster. His father said of him: ‘He is a sad rogue, but in spite of his roguery, I have no doubt he will yet be a shining character.’ In his early teens Astley was present when a young friend fell, as a wagon was passing, and as he lay prone, a wagon wheel compressed his popliteal fossa resulting in exsanguination and death. Astley Cooper later recalled: ‘This seems to have made a strong impression upon my mind, as it was the first death I had witnessed, and I was directly convinced how valuable a member of society a wellinformed surgeon must be, and how great a curse an ignorant surgeon was.’ He left home to begin work at Guy’s Hospital in August 1784, when he was just 16 years of age and began to attend John Hunter’s lectures early in his
Cooper’s life was essentially modelled on that of John Hunter. He wrote: ‘Mr Hunter was a man who thought for himself, but he was more; he was the most industrious man that ever lived. He worked from six in the morning till 12 o’clock at night and sometimes later.’ Cooper was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1802, for his papers suggesting that certain forms of deafness might be relieved by myringotomy. Cooper successfully removed a scalp cyst for George IV in 1821 and was made a Baronet. Although he married twice, he had no son of his own and requested that the baronetcy be entailed upon his nephew, Astley. The first number of the Lancet was published on 5 October 1823, at the beginning of the academic year; it
contained an account of Sir Astley Cooper’s opening lecture: ‘At half-past seven the theatre was crowded in every part by upwards of four hundred students of the most respectable description; in fact, we never before witnessed so genteel a surgical class; the sight was most pleasing, for they all appeared gentlemen of cultivated manners and good education.’ Astley Cooper was not a prolific writer, neither did he hurry to publish his work, but his publications are impressive in their number and size, and most of all, in their quality. His first papers appeared in 1798 and his last book, the ‘Anatomy of the Breast’, was published in 1840, his publications extending over a period of 42 years. He followed the principle of neither teaching nor writing of things that he had not observed or verified himself by practice. This condition demanded much labour in dissection and in animal experiment, in addition to onerous clinical activities. In the Bradshaw Lecture for 1893, ‘Sir Astley Cooper and His Surgical Work’, Sir William MacCormac noted that the chief repositories for morbid anatomy were private collections, such as those of William and John Hunter, and that of
