Samuel Cooper (surgeon)

Samuel Cooper (1780 to 1848) was an English surgeon and medical writer whose textbooks shaped surgical teaching in the early nineteenth century. Educated at Greenwich, he entered St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1800, became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1803 and won the college's Jacksonian prize in 1806 for an essay on diseases of the joints. His First Lines of Surgery appeared in 1807 and his Surgical Dictionary in 1809; both went through many editions, and the dictionary was translated into French, German and Italian. He served as an army surgeon at Waterloo, then returned to practice. From 1831 to 1848 he was surgeon to University College Hospital and professor of surgery in the college. His 1840 First Lines of the Theory and Practice of Surgery is cited as the first formal acknowledgement that advanced melanoma could not be treated. He became President of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1845 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1846.