An old saying says, “Laughter is the best medicine. ” One person who certainly would have agreed with this is Norman Cousins.
Norman Cousins was the editor of magazine called Saturday Review for almost forty years. He also wrote and spoke about world peace and anti-nuclear and anti-war issues, travelling to many different countries to share his ideas.
In the 1960s, after returning to the United States from a busy and tiring trip to Europe, Mr. Cousins got sick. He discovered he had a rare disease, known as ankylosing spondylitis, that caused the joints between his bones to become stiff.
In less than a week after he got back, he could not stand. Every move that he made was painful. He was not able to sleep at night. The doctors told Mr. Cousins that they did not know how to cure his problem and he might never get over the illness. Mr. Cousins, however, refused to give up hope.
Mr. Cousins thought that the illness could be caused by unhappy thoughts. He did not want to take medicine to cure himself. Instead, he felt that happy thoughts or laughter might cure his illness.
He began to experiment on himself while still in the hospital by watching Comedy shows on television. Mr. Cousins quickly found that ten minutes of real laughter during the day gave him two hours of pain-free sleep at night.
Deciding that the doctors could not help him, Mr. Cousins left the hospital and checked into a hotel room where he could continue his experiments with laughter. For eight weeks , Mr. Cousins rested in the hotel room watching comedy shows on television, reading amusing books, and sleeping whenever he felt tired. Within three weeks, he felt well enough to take vacation to Puerto Rico where he began running on the beach for exercise.
After a few months, Mr. Cousins was able to carry on his work. He had laughed himself back to health.
- Who was Norman Cousins?
- What was the name of his magazine?
- When did he return to the United States?
- When did he get sick?
- What was the name of his disease?
- What did the doctors tell him?
- What did he decide to do?
- What kind of experiments did Mr. Cousins begin to do when he realise that doctors could not cure him?
- How long did it take from him to get over his illness completely?
- What was the result of the treatment?
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