Cochrane, Archibald L.

Archibald L. (Archie) Cochrane (1909–1988) was a British physician who contributed greatly to the development of epidemiology, and he was a pioneer in evidence-based medicine. His ideas eventually led to the creation of the international Cochrane Collaboration, which tracks down, evaluates, and synthesizes the results of clinical trials and other studies in all areas of medicine.

Cochrane was born in 1909 in Scotland to a wealthy family. He began his medical studies in 1934 at the University College Hospital, London, after receiving first class honors in the Natural Sciences Tripos from King's College, Cambridge. In 1936, he served in a field ambulance unit in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. In 1938, he qualified in medicine (receiving what is equivalent to a medical degree in the United States). With the outbreak of World War II, Cochrane enlisted and served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. While on duty in Crete in 1941, he was captured and taken prisoner by the Nazis. For the rest of the war, he was as a medical officer in various prisoner-of-war camps in Greece and Germany. Many prisoners he treated suffered from tuberculosis, and he became interested in studying the disease. After the war, through a Rockefeller scholarship, he attended the Diploma in Public Health program at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 1947–1948, he left Britain to study the epidemiology of tuberculosis at the Henry Phipps Institute in Philadelphia.

Returning to the United Kingdom, from 1948 to 1960, Cochrane was a member of the Medical Research Council's (MRC's) Pneumoconiosis Research Unit in Penarth, Wales. His work at the council included the study and classification of pneumoconiosis, a common occupational lung disease of coal miners in Wales. At his work, he [Page 180]became increasingly interested in the reproducibil-ity of all clinical and related measurements, as well as many aspects of field epidemiology, such as the standardization of collected data and the validation of diagnoses.

In 1960, Cochrane was appointed the David Davies Professor of Tuberculosis and Chest Diseases at the Welsh National School of Medicine in Cardiff. He also became the director of the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Research Unit.

In 1972, Cochrane gave the Rock Carling Lecture “Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services,” which was subsequently published as a book. In the book, which he is best known for, Cochrane stressed the need to use the evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

In 1974, he presented the Dunham Lectures at Harvard University; and in 1975, he became an honorary fellow of the American Epidemiological Society.

Archibald Cochrane died in 1988 at the age of 79. His autobiography, One Man's Medicine, written with the assistance of Max Blythe, was published in 1989.

Cochrane's ideas were instrumental in the founding of the Cochrane Collaboration in 1993. The collaboration is an international, nonprofit, independent organization that produces and disseminates systematic reviews of healthcare interventions and promotes the search for evidence from clinical trials and other studies. Its major product is the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, which is published quarterly as part of the Cochrane Library.

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