Archie Cochrane

One Man's Medicine: An Autobiography of Professor Archie Cochrane was published in 1989 and co-authored by Max Blythe. The book was out of print for a number of years but a paperback edition was published by Cardiff University in April 2009 to celebrate the centenary of Cochrane's birth.

Maintaining this challenge to the medical care system as he saw it, in 1978, with colleagues, he published a study of 18 developed countries in which he made the following observations: "the indices of health care are not negatively associated with mortality, and there is a marked positive association between the prevalence of doctors and mortality in the younger age groups. No explanation of this doctor anomaly has so far been found. Gross national product per head is the principal variable which shows a consistently strong negative association with mortality." This work was selected for inclusion in a compendium of influential papers, from historically important epidemiologists, published by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) in 1988.

His 1971 Rock Carling Fellowship monograph Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services, first published in 1972 by the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust – now known as the Nuffield Trust, was very influential. To quote from the book's summary :

In 1960 he was appointed David Davies Professor of Tuberculosis and Chest Diseases at the Welsh National School of Medicine, now Cardiff University School of Medicine, and nine years later became Director of the new Medical Research Council's Epidemiology Research Unit at 4 Richmond Road, Cardiff. His groundbreaking paper on validation of medical screening procedures, published jointly with fellow epidemiologist Walter W. Holland in 1971, became a classic in the field.

In 1956 Cochrane underwent a radical mastectomy to remove what was thought to be cancerous tissue in his right pectoralis minor and axilla.

After the war he studied for a Diploma in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and spent a year at the Henry Phipps Institute in Philadelphia on a Rockefeller Fellowship. Cochrane joined the Medical Research Council's Pneumoconiosis Unit at Llandough Hospital, a part of Welsh National School of Medicine, now Cardiff University School of Medicine in 1948. Here he began a series of studies on the health of the population of Rhondda Fach — studies which pioneered the use of randomised controlled trials (RCTs).

Cochrane was born in Kirklands, Galashiels, Scotland, into a family he described as "industrial upper middle class". His father was killed whilst serving with the King's Own Scottish Borderers during World War I. He won a scholarship to Uppingham School, and obtained another scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, achieving first class honours in Parts I and II of the Natural Sciences Tripos and completing 2nd MB studies in physiology and anatomy in 1930. He qualified in 1938 at University College Hospital, London, at University College London.

Archibald Leman Cochrane CBE (12 January 1909 – 18 June 1988) was a Scottish doctor noted for his book Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services. This book advocated the use of randomized control trials to make medicine more effective and efficient. His advocacy of randomized controlled trials eventually led to the development of the Cochrane Library database of systematic reviews, the establishment of the UK Cochrane Centre in Oxford and the international organisation Cochrane. He is known as one of the fathers of modern clinical epidemiology and evidence-based medicine and is considered to be the originator of the idea of evidence-based medicine in the current era.