Researching William Cowper

After being institutionalised for insanity, Cowper found refuge in a fervent evangelical Christianity. He continued to suffer doubt and, after a dream in 1773, believed that he was doomed to eternal damnation. He recovered and wrote more religious hymns.

His religious sentiment and association with John Newton (who wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace") led to much of the poetry for which he is best remembered, and to the series of Olney Hymns. His poem "Light Shining out of Darkness" gave English the phrase: "God moves in a mysterious way/ His wonders to perform."

He also wrote a number of anti-slavery poems and his friendship with Newton, who was an avid anti-slavery campaigner, resulted in Cowper being asked to write in support of the Abolitionist campaign. Cowper wrote a poem called "The Negro's Complaint" (1788) which rapidly became very famous, and was often quoted by Martin Luther King Jr. during the 20th-century civil rights movement. He also wrote several other less well known poems on slavery in the 1780s, many of which attacked the idea that slavery was economically viable.

Cowper was born in Petersfield, Hampshire, and he was apprenticed to a London surgeon, William Bignall, in March 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, and was buried in St Peter's Church, Petersfield.

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 research and fresh new insights. He also commissioned nine new plates drawn by Henry Cooke (1642–1700) and engraved by Michiel van der Gucht (1660–1725), among which were front and back views of the entire musculature. The book was then published under Cowper's name with no mention of Bidloo or Lairesse, with the original engraved, allegorical title page amended with an irregular piece of paper lettered: "The anatomy of the humane bodies ...," which fits over the Dutch title.

A number of vitriolic exchanges took place between Bidloo and Cowper, including several pamphlets published in each anatomist's defence. Cowper claimed, without much evidence presented, that the plates were not Bidloo's at all, but that they were commissioned by Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680) and that after his death Swammerdam's widow had sold them to Bidloo. Whatever the truth may be, it is undeniable that Cowper was a great anatomist and surgeon in his own right – and that he clearly did not give Govard Bidloo proper credit for his involvement in this work.