Cooper began her medical career at London's
Royal Free Hospital as a house physician, a house officer in
obstetrics, and first assistant in the
paediatric department. She received a diploma in child health in 1948 and moved to
Newcastle the following year to join
James Calvert Spence as a paediatric registrar at
Newcastle General Hospital. She was appointed consultant in 1952, and held the role until her retirement in 1983. In the 1960s, she turned her focus to abused children, embracing the ideas of
C. Henry Kempe, an American who argued that child abuse was more prevalent than previously thought. While most British specialists refuted Kempe's research, according to the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Cooper was "one of the first child specialists in Britain to recognise the prevalence, and the physical, psychological, and sexual nature, of child abuse". In 1979 she co-founded the British Association for the Study and Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (now the Association of Child Protection Professionals), subsequently serving as its president. She was also a member of an early research group on child abuse that influenced national government policy in the 1970s. ==Death==