Background
Esaias Samuel Cooper was born on November 25, 1820 on a farm near Somerville, Ohio, United States. He was the son of Jacob and Elizabeth (Walls) Cooper, and a brother of Jacob Cooper.
https://www.amazon.com/OPERATION-Chirugical-Association-Additional-Transactions/dp/B00CP9N9TI?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00CP9N9TI
Esaias Samuel Cooper was born on November 25, 1820 on a farm near Somerville, Ohio, United States. He was the son of Jacob and Elizabeth (Walls) Cooper, and a brother of Jacob Cooper.
At the age of sixteen Elias attended a course in medicine at Cincinnati. Later he entered St. Louis University at St. Louis, Missouri, where he obtained his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1841.
Cooper began his medical practice at Danville, Illinois. In 1844 he moved to Peoria in the same state, where he practised for ten years. Following a year spent in European surgical clinics, he went to San Francisco in 1855. Soon after his arrival, he was instrumental in organizing the Medical Society of the State of California. In 1858 Cooper founded in San Francisco the first medical college on the Pacific coast, known as the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific. In 1860 he began the publication of the San Francisco Medical Press, a quarterly journal of medicine and surgery, which was continued after his death by his nephew, Dr. Levi Cooper Lane, who was associated with his uncle in practise. It is in this journal that most of Cooper’s published writings appear.
From the time of his arrival in San Francisco, Cooper was recognized as a surgeon of skill and originality. As professor of surgery his teaching was marked by earnestness, without oratory. It is noteworthy that he conducted a course in operative surgery upon animals. His claims to permanent recognition in surgery rest upon his use of alcoholic dressings of wounds, the treatment of diseased joints by free incision, the use of metallic sutures for un-united fractures and free exploration of the thoracic cavity after rib resection. Such aggressive leadership could not fail to arouse jealousies and Cooper’s later years were somewhat embittered by a long-drawn-out suit for malpractise in a case of Caesarian section. The suit never came to trial.
Soon after arriving in California he had developed an obscure nervous affection which later caused a bilateral facial paralysis and intense neuralgic pains. In the spring of 1862 he went to the mountains on account of his condition; in May he went suddenly blind, but later recovered some vision. He died in San Francisco in October of that year.
His medical school lived until 1864, two years after the death of its founder. It was reorganized in 1870 as the Medical College of the Pacific; again in 1880, as Cooper Medical College, when Dr. Levi Cooper Lane donated a site and erected an imposing building for the school; and in 1908 it was taken over by Stanford University.
Cooper was a large, powerful man, intensely earnest, vigorous in language and quick to resent what he considered injustices. He read and wrote only medicine, he thought only medicine and talked only medicine. He slept little, saying that sleep was so much time stolen from life and from his work.
Cooper was never married.