One Man's Medicine: An autobiography of Professor Archie Cochrane

In 1927 Archie Cochrane set out for a career in clinical Medicine and research. It was not to be. In 'One Man's Medicine', he recollects how events and experiences turned him instead to epidemiology and chapioning evidence-based medicine, with which his name is now inextricably linked. It is a story of colossal early drama, including service with a field ambulance unit in the carnage of Spain's Civil War. Four years as a POW medical officer in overcrowded, disease-plagued prison camps in World War 2. In the desperation of their impossible clinical demands he took to data collection - just crude trials and surveys - to reveal best options to worst situations, and emerged with a vision of surveying entire populations in peacetime with the precision possible within prison confines. In post-war decades, while surveying mining communities in South Wales for solutions to their industrial scourge of pneumoconiosis, this vision became reality as his passion for data collection advanced. No communities were more rigourously investigated, their response rates unprecedented, attracting national and international attention to the extent to which healthcare could be evidence based. Cochrane's reference populations became the inspiration of thousands of health professions and care planners, and Cochrane increasingly influential in British healthcare politics and thorn in the flesh of traditional medical attitudes. His classic text 'Effectiveness and Efficiency: random reflections on health services' (1972) championed a new era of health care logic. Read more