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 Dr. Hutton, physician to William III, had told Bidloo that Cowper was about to translate and plagiarise his work, whereupon Bidloo wrote an abrupt letter to Cowper in Latin, which received no answer; other letters to Cowper and to and from Dr. Hutton followed, and finally Bidloo accused Smith and Walford, the publishers, and Cowper himself of fraud in publishing the plates and of issuing a mere pirated compilation from Bidloo's anatomy. After several months Cowper wrote to Bidloo denying Bidloo's sole right to the plates, and repudiating the charge of borrowing a text which was, he said, erroneous, and which he had made his own by endless corrections and amplifications, nothing resembling Bidloo being left but a common basis of universally accepted anatomy. The whole correspondence is printed in Bidloo's tract with much abusive language, and a minute criticism of Cowper as an anatomist. Cowper is called a highwayman in English, lest the Latin term should not be clear enough, and is said to be a miserable anatomist who writes like a Dutch barber. In 1701 Cowper replied in ‘Eucharistia in qua dotes plurimæ et singulares Godefridi Bidloo M.D. et in illustrissima Leydarum Academia anatomiæ professoris celeberrimi, peritia anatomica, probitas, ingenium, elegantiæ latinitatis, lepores, candor, humanitas, ingenuitas, solertia, verecundia, humilitas, urbanitas, &c., celebrantur et ejusdem citationi humillime respondetur.’ These figures, says Cowper, were drawn by Gerard de Luirens for Swammerdam, and Cowper's publisher had purchased impressions of them. Entirely fresh descriptions had been added, and the book was a new one and no piracy. Very little evidence is produced of these statements. The controversy has all the acerbity of its contemporary dispute on the epistles of Phalaris, and Cowper's title seems to have been suggested by parts of the index of Boyle against Bentley. An impartial perusal shows that Bidloo unjustly depreciates Cowper's work and has no ground for charging him with plagiarism as far as the descriptive anatomy is concerned. The origin of the work seems, however, to have been a request to Cowper from the English publishers to write letterpress to the Dutch plates, and though the plates may have been prepared for Swammerdam, it remains clear that some invasion of the rights of Bidloo and his Dutch publishers in the plates took place, and that Cowper connived at this invasion. The book shows an amount of learning acquired by dissection and of original observation beyond all plagiarism, and it took its place as the best English anatomy which had appeared. In 1702 Cowper published ‘Glandularum quarundam nuper detectarum ductuumque earum excretionum descriptio cum figuris.’ A pair of racemose glands, which are themselves situated beneath the anterior end of the membranous part of the urethra in the male, and whose ducts open into the bulbous part of the urethra, are described, and are to this day known by anatomists as Cowper's glands. There are some remarks by Cowper in Drake's ‘Anthropologia’ (London, 1717, i. 138), and he published several papers in the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ of which the most interesting are: (No. 208) experiments with Colbatch's styptic, in which he shows the dangerous and ineffectual nature of the nostrum, and incidentally points out the differences between the vascular system of youth and that of age; (222) on the effects of a renal calculus lasting eight years in the kidney of a woman; (252) a case of union of a divided heel tendon in a carpenter after Cowper had united the edges by sutures; (285) on cases of empyema; (286) on the structure of the pulmonary vein; (310) anatomical and chirurgical observations (in this important paper he describes how he had demonstrated the junction of arterial and venous capillaries in a cat and in a dog); (299) in this paper he exactly describes degenerative disease of the aortic valves, and had clearly observed the pulse which accompanies such disease, a discovery often erroneously attributed to Corrigan in 1829, more justly claimed for Vieussens in 1715, but certainly first made by Cowper.

Cowper had a considerable surgical practice, and these papers prove that his attainments in pathology and comparative anatomy were as respectable as his knowledge of human anatomy and practical surgery.

In 1708 he suffered from difficulty of breathing, and during the winter became dropsical. He gave up work ( Preface) and retired to his native place, where he died on 8 March 1709, and is buried in the parish church. 

COWPER, WILLIAM, first (d. 1723), first lord chancellor of Great Britain, grandson of Sir William Cowper, created a baronet for his royalist devotion 4 March 1642, was eldest son of Sir William Cowper, bart., a whig politician, who was concerned with Shaftesbury in indicting the Duke of York as a popish recusant in 1680, and who represented Hertford in parliament in 1679–81 and 1689–1700, and died in 1706. His mother was Sarah,