After studying medicine at London and Oxford, receiving his M.D. from St. Andrews in 1805, Hooper was appointed physician at St. Marylebone Hospital, London. The morbid anatomy of the brain was, in the author's words, an 'account of all the morbid appearances and alterations which the brain and its membranes have been found to have undergone.' It includes fifteen colour-printed stipple-engraved plates by J. Wedgewood, and J. Stewart, sen, after J. Howship, G. Kirtland, and J. Stewart, jun.