William Cowper (anatomist)

William Cowper was an English surgeon and anatomist, born in Petersfield, Hampshire, around 1666 and died in 1709. He was apprenticed to a London surgeon in 1682, joined the Company of Barber-Surgeons in 1691 and began practising in London that year. He published Myotomia Reformata on the muscles in 1694, was elected to the Royal Society in 1696, and in 1698 issued The Anatomy of the Humane Bodies. He is remembered for his early description of the structure now called Cowper's gland. The 1698 book became controversial: it reused plates that the Dutch anatomist Govard Bidloo had published in 1685, with new English text and nine new plates, and without crediting Bidloo, which led to a bitter exchange of pamphlets between the two men. Later writers have judged the episode differently, though most agree that Cowper was a capable anatomist and surgeon in his own right.