Norman Cousins Laughed His Way Back to Health

Norman Cousins, editor of Saturday Review magazine for more than thirty years, healed himself by laughing. So the over-simplified story goes.

In the mid-1960s, when Cousins was about fifty years old, he was diagnosed as having the life-threatening disease, ankylosing spondylitis.  This is a form of arthritis that primarily affects the spine, causing inflammation of the joints between the vertebrae.  Over time, the vertebrae can join together and can cause paralysis.  When he was diagnosed, doctors gave him only months to live.

Upon hearing this news, Cousins checked himself out of the hospital and took charge of his own treatment, dosing himself with massive quantities of vitamin C and provoking laughter within himself by watching large doses of Marx Brothers movies.

The results were phenomenal. Cousins regained the use of his arms and legs, and he went back to work full-time at the Saturday Review.

Some years later, in 1980, when he was sixty-five, illness struck again, this time in the form of a massive heart attack. Again, Cousins mainly doctored himself and returned to regular activity. He wrote books about the two experiences: Anatomy of an Illness for the first and The Healing Heart for the second. 

Cousins died ten years after the heart attack, at age seventy-five on this date, November 30, in 1990.

The website http://www.dailycelebrations.com/072799.htm quotes Cousins as saying, "Laughter may or may not activate the endorphins or enhance respiration, as some medical researchers contend. What seems clear, however, is that laughter is an antidote to apprehension and panic." He asked, "Is it possible that love, hope, faith, laughter, confidence, and the will to live have therapeutic value?" He said he deliberately had hearty laughs several times a day and that a few minutes of laughter gave him an hour or more of pain-free sleep.

Cousins’ approach to healing was, and is, highly controversial. But the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) now has the Norman Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, which studies and promotes a holistic approach to medicine. 

If there is any place in your theology for miraculous healing, isn't this akin to what Cousins practiced? If there is value in prayer for the sick, is this somehow related to the experience of Norman Cousins, when healing came in an unexpected way?

This is not a call to abandon medical treatment or to rely on folk remedies in an age of scientific miracles. Rather, this is a reminder that the individual mind and spirit many times has found healing when medical science could not.

Give thanks for the gift of the will to survive.

Verses for Today

“[Jesus] said to him, ‘Do you want to be made well?’ The sick man said, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool . . .’ Jesus said to him, ‘Stand up, take your mat and walk.’ At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk” (John 5:6-8).

Each day through New Year’s Day, January 1, 2013, daily inspirational thoughts will appear on this website, in keeping with Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas, and New Year’s Day.  These are from my book, Reflections for the Festive Seasons.  © 2002.  All rights reserved.