All fellows are unique, but none (in his generation) was as unique as Archie Cochrane. Born at Galashiels into a family that had become moderately wealthy by manufacturing textiles, his early life was traditional enough, taking him via Uppingham to King’s College, Cambridge, where he obtained first class honours in both parts of the natural sciences tripos and nurtured the ambition of becoming a don. Fortunately for medicine, the problem he began to tackle proved to be a sterile aspect of tissue culture and he soon became dissatisfied with its triviality and his own technical incompetence. When, therefore, he developed a functional symptom, which no English physician could cure, he abandoned his project and sought advice at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, then the fount of academic medicine. Again obtaining no relief and becoming intrigued, like so many other young people at the time, with the ideas of Freud, he turned to psychoanalysis. The next two years in Berlin, Vienna and Amsterdam, following his Jewish analyst as he fled from Hitler, gave him a hatred of fascism, fluent German, and a sceptical attitude to all theories not validated by experiment.
In 1935 Archie returned to Britain and started clinical medicine at University College Hospital, where he was greatly influenced by the enthusiasm and scientific rigour of Sir Thomas Lewis [Munk's Roll, Vol.VI, p.531] and George Pickering, later Sir George [Munk's Roll, Vol.VII,p.464] and by the social concern of Philip D’Arcy Hart. It was four years, however, before he qualified, as the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War led him to join an ambulance unit in support of the Republic, in which he must have been the only member with neither political nor religious affiliation. He returned to Britain after a year, in which he had gained experience of triage on the Madrid front, and qualified just in time to complete a house job at the West London Hospital and to obtain a research appointment at UCH - before resigning to join the Army. Eighteen months later he found himself a prisoner of war, having been captured with an ill-starred commando unit in Crete. For most of the rest of the war he was the British officer in charge of prison hospitals, in which he had first hand experience of Nazi brutality, carried out his first controlled experiment to find a cure for famine oedema, became an expert on tuberculosis, and exposed himself to such a large dose of x-rays that he developed, 20 years later, a squamous carcinoma on the back of his hand.
On demobilization, Archie obtained a Rockefeller fellowship in preventive medicine, which involved a course at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he fell under the influence of Austin Bradford Hill, later Sir Austin, and then a year at the Henry Phipps clinic in Philadelphia. At the latter, he came across the problem of inter- and intra-personal variation in the reading of x-rays and developed his interest in the scientific study of diagnostic and prognostic error.