[6] But crucially, in a precursor of his landmark contribution to medicine: His sojourn in Europe in the early 1930s also instilled in him a hatred of fascism and a sceptical attitude to all theories (including psychoanalysis) which had not been validated in experiments.
Subsequently he worked as a Medical Officer in prisoner of war camps at Salonika (Greece) and Hildburghausen, Elsterhorst, and Wittenberg an der Elbe (Germany).
[10] He said, "I knew that there was no real evidence that anything we had to offer had any effect on tuberculosis, and I was afraid that I shortened the lives of some of my friends by unnecessary intervention.
After the war, Cochrane studied for a Diploma in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, after which he spent a year at the Henry Phipps Institute in Philadelphia on a Rockefeller Fellowship.
[14] The website of the British Film Institute has a video of the Rhondda Fach studies in which Cochrane talks about his research.
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.
[10] 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.
Gross national product per head is the principal variable which shows a consistently strong negative association with mortality.
"[10] 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.
[21] Cochrane was awarded an MBE by the British Government for his "gallant and distinguished services in prisoner of war camps.