William Cowper FRS (c.
1666 – 8 March 1709) was an English
surgeon and
anatomist, famous for his early description of what is now known as the
Cowper's gland.
Cowper was born in
Petersfield, Hampshire, and he was apprenticed to a
London surgeon,
William Bignall, in March of 1682. He was admitted to the
Company of Barber-Surgeons in 1691 and began practising in London the same year. In 1694, he published his noted work,
Myotomia Reformata, or a New Administration of the Muscles, and he was elected a member of the
Royal Society in 1696. In 1698, he published
The Anatomy of the Humane Bodies, which gained him great fame and notoriety, and over the next eleven years he published a number of tracts on topics ranging from
surgery and
pathology to
physiology and
anatomy. He died on 8 March 1709.
Some have called Cowper's
Anatomy of the Humane Bodies one of the greatest acts of
plagiarism in all of medical publishing, though others have not been as harsh. In 1685,
Govard Bidloo (1649-1713) published his
Anatomia Humani Corporis in
Amsterdam using 105 beautiful plates drawn by
Gérard de Lairesse (1640-1711) and engraved by
Abraham Blooteling (1640-1690). A
Dutch version was later printed in 1690, entitled
Ontleding des Menschelyken Lichaams, but when sales went poorly, Bidloo's publishers sold 300 copies of the unbound plates to William Cowper (or his publishers).
Cowper proceeded to write a new English text to accompany the plates, many of them showing a great deal of original...
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