Archie Cochrane

Archie Cochrane (1909 to 1988) was a Scottish physician who argued that medical practice should rest on tested evidence, above all on randomized controlled trials. Born into a mill-owning family in Galashiels and educated at Cambridge and University College Hospital in London, he worked in Berlin, Vienna and Leiden before the Spanish Civil War, where he served with a British medical unit. Captured on Crete in 1941, he was a medical officer in prisoner of war camps and ran a small trial of vitamin C against yeast among the prisoners; he later wrote that he had seen how little of what doctors offered was backed by proof. After the war he studied public health, worked for the Medical Research Council in South Wales and became a professor in Cardiff. His 1972 book Effectiveness and Efficiency pressed the National Health Service to test its methods, and its argument led to the Cochrane Library, the UK Cochrane Centre in Oxford and the international Cochrane organization. He is widely counted among the founders of modern clinical epidemiology and of evidence-based medicine.