[6] Astley Cooper received the Copley Medal in 1801 for two papers read before the Royal Society of London on the destruction of the tympanic membrane.

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 21,000 pounds sterling.

[6] In 1817 Cooper performed his famous operation of tying the abdominal aorta for aneurysm; and in 1820 he removed an infected wen (in more modern terminology, a sebaceous cyst) from the scalp of King George IV.

In 1805 he published in the first volume of Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, an account of his attempt to tie the common carotid artery for treating an aneurysm in a patient.

[22] Cooper was an anatomist and identified several previously undescribed anatomical structures, many of which were named after him: He also described a number of new diseases, which likewise became eponymous: His chief published works were: