From The Attic — For a Kinder, Cooler America
The summer of 1964 was grim. Three Civil Rights workers missing in Mississippi. Riots in Harlem. The Gulf of Tonkin incident deepening America’s quagmire in Vietnam.
That August, editor Norman Cousins returned from a cultural exchange in the Soviet Union. Back home in Connecticut, Cousins felt achy, fatigued. At 49, he thought little of his condition, but within days, he was bed-ridden, and by September hospitalized in critical condition.
The diagnosis was bleak: a connective tissue disease. Connective tissue binds the body in ligaments, muscles, the spinal cord. “I was, in some sense, coming unstuck,” Cousins remembered. Doctors put his chance of recovery at one in 500. Pain tormented Cousins’ every movement. The end might not come soon but it would be agonizing. There was no cure.
Cousins had based his career on hope. During boyhood in New Jersey, he “set out to discover exuberance.” Not even a misdiagnosed case of TB and a stint in a sanatorium soured him. Interested in everything, he soared beyond daily journalism, becoming, at 27, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature.
After World War II, Cousins spoke throughout America, meeting “a new breed. . . people who were business executives, or in science, say, who were interested in ideas.” Sensing the spreading curiosity, Cousins made Saturday Review its oracle. Circulation rose from 20,000 to 600,000. Saturday Review was brave and iconoclastic, criticizing cigarette ads, media violence, racism. . . But one topic loomed above the rest — survival.
In 1957, Cousins co-founded SANE: The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. During the darkest days of the Cold War, SANE fought the madness with full-page ads, marches, and other protests, rallying Americans against atmospheric nuclear testing. In 1963, when the US and USSR signed a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, among JFK’s envoys to Moscow was Norman Cousins. The following summer, he was flat on his back.
“The bones in my spine and practically every joint in my body felt as though I had been run over by a truck.”
Palliative care quickly roused Cousins’ suspicions of modern medicine. Hospital food — white bread and over-cooked vegetables — was anything but healthy. Nightly interruptions of sleep enraged him. And when four doctors took blood on a single day, Cousins saw that “if I was to be that one in 500, I had better be more than a passive observer.”
Among many interests, Cousins had studied the relationship between mind and body, between emotions and health. Didn’t everyone say “laughter is the best medicine?” Why not try it?
Cousins’ doctor saw no harm, no alternative. With a movie projector brought to his hospital room, Cousins began watching Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and clips from “Candid Camera.” Nurses read him Benchley, Thurber, Mark Twain. . .
And the “laughter cure” began to work. “I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect, and would give me at least two hours of pain free sleep.” Blood tests after each dose of mirth also showed improvement. There was one side effect — his laughter disturbed other patients — but Cousins was soon well enough to continue his cure at home. Within six months, he was back at Saturday Review.
The story jumps to another grim year — 1979. President Carter lamenting America’s malaise. The nation still haunted by Vietnam and Watergate. Oil embargoes, hostages, nuclear crisis at Three Mile Island. Into this bleakness fell Norman Cousins’ Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient.
Some doctors were skeptical. This was the Placebo Effect, a “Travesty of an Illness,” “pleasant, well-written nonsense,”
But Cousins’ report also ran in the New England Journal of Medicine. Other medical journals agreed — even if his other drug, Vitamin C, was over-rated, laughter had to be good for you. On into the 1980s, Anatomy of an Illness opened Western medicine to new treatments. Some were common sense, others snake oil, but the hospital door was ajar. It has never fully closed. And today?
In the midst of this pandemic, other viral infections are spreading. The first is fear, more contagious than any virus and just as disabling. Another is cynicism, blocking every possibility with a “Yeah, but.” A third is despair, dousing every hope with “it won’t work.” Many viral victims are emotionally bed-ridden, others just going through the motions. Our Apocalypse Now needs a cure as surely as Cousins did.
So why not try laughter? Why not resolve, in 2021, to turn each morning not to today’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Cable News, Social Media, Newspapers, and Rumor — but to a dose of Chaplin, the Marxes, or a favorite comedian? Instead of Googling “Congress” or “COVID,” why not Google “Benchley” or “Thurber” or “Dave Barry?”
Norman Cousins had to rent a movie projector, but the Internet makes laughter as accessible as the headlines. In this fresh new year, which will be your connective tissue?
As the controversy over his book raged, Norman Cousins had the last laugh. Given a teaching post at UCLA medical school, he wrote three more books about emotions and healing. He died of a heart attack in 1990, thirty-six years after laughter revived his spirit, his health, his future. What are you waiting for?
