Following military service in the Finnish Army during World War II, he attended the University of Helsinki Medical School, and graduated in 1951.
[2] Later, Kock spent five years in surgical training at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, an institution he remained affiliated with for the rest of his professional career.
[1] In the 1960s, Kock experimented on cats and dogs in an effort to develop an internal "continent bladder" which used a reservoir created from the small intestine of candidates receiving ileostomy surgery.
[1] In 1969, he published his manuscript detailing a technique he had established of creating an intra-abdominal reservoir, offering an alternative to conventional ileostomy which required the use of external appliances to collect waste.
[3] Ileostomy is the procedure whereby individuals with a number of intestinal malfunctions (such as those arising from ulcerative colitis, familial polyposis, late-stage Crohn's disease, and others), are equipped with stomas for excretory purposes.
[10] An ongoing problem with the Kock procedure had been its inability to maintain the drainage valve (or stoma) in the proper position, even with the inclusion of the nipple.
[12] Later in his career, Kock became a visiting lecturer worldwide in order to educate and advance the use of his urostomy surgical technique into Third World nations where bilharzial disease was prevalent.