een born
in 1605, four years before his more famous brother. He came to Sweden in
1646, and the Swedish documents declare that he was a Jew, and that his
full name was Abraham Alexander Cooper. He had previously been residing
in Holland, but on reaching Sweden entered the service of Queen
Christina, and continued to be her miniature painter until 1654, when
she resigned the crown. Two years later, Cooper was in Denmark, carrying
out some commissions for Christian IV., but in 1657 was back again in
Stockholm, where he died in the early part of 1660. The date of his
birth is not known, but he is believed to have been born in London.

For full information regarding his career, and for various documents
bearing his signature, see _The History of Portrait Miniatures_, by G.
C. Williamson, chap. vi. page 78, and an article in the _Nineteenth
Century_ for October 1905. (G. C. W.)

COOPER, SIR ASTLEY PASTON (1768-1841), English surgeon, was born at the
village of Brooke in Norfolk on the 23rd of August 1768. His father, Dr
Samuel Cooper, was a clergyman of the Church of England; his mother was
the author of several novels. At the age of sixteen he was sent to
London and placed under Henry Cline (1750-1827), surgeon to St Thomas's
hospital. From the first he devoted himself to the study of anatomy, and
had the privilege of attending the lectures of John Hunter. In 1789 he
was appointed demonstrator of anatomy at St Thomas's hospital, where in
1791 he became joint lecturer with Cline in anatomy and surgery, and in
1800 he was appointed surgeon to Guy's hospital, on the death of his
uncle, William Cooper. In 1802 he received the Copley medal for two
papers read before the Royal Society of London on the destruction of the
_membrana tympani_; and in 1805 he was elected a fellow of that society.
In the same year he took an active part in the formation of the
Medico-Chirurgical Society, and published in the first volume of its
_Transactions_ an account of an attempt to tie the common carotid artery
for aneurism. In 1804 he brought out the first, and in 1807 the second,
part of his great work on hernia, which added so largely to his
reputation that in 1813 his annual professional income rose to L21,000
sterling. In the same year he was appointed professor of comparative
anatomy to the Royal College of Surgeons and was very popular as a
lecturer. In 1817 he performed his famous operation of tying the
abdominal aorta f