Cooper, James F. (1880-1931) (birth control)

James F. Cooper was recruited by Margaret Sanger to lecture on contraceptive practices to physicians unable to come to New York City for instruction. A physician, Cooper had been a medical missionary to China from 1913 to the end of World War I, when he returned to Boston to set up practice as an obstetrician in Boston’s slums. He was convinced that this was as important a field as the Far East for a medical missionary. Hired at a salary of $10,000 a year and expenses as medical director of the Birth Control League in 1925, Cooper spoke to hundreds of county medical societies and compiled a list of several thousand physicians to whom patients could be referred by the Birth Control League for contraceptive advice. His Techniques of Contraception, published in 1928, was the first American medical book to deal with up-to-date methods of contraception available in the United States in the post-World War I period.