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Authors: Norman Cousins
Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (17 page)
The response from the national and international medical community was overwhelmingly positive.
Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient
was snapped up by Norton Publishers, staying atop the
New York Times
bestseller list for months to come. Its bestseller status led to a made-for-TV movie, one whose Hollywood dramatization was not to Cousins's liking, but to which he was nonetheless grateful for its popularization of the ideas the story contained.
Norman Cousins was the author of more than twenty-two books, including
The Good Inheritance
,
Modern Man Is Obsolete
,
In God We Trust
,
Dr. Schweitzer of Lambaréné
,
The Improbable Triumvirate
,
Present Tense: An American Editor's Odyssey
,
The Celebration of Life
,
The Politics of Power
,
The Physician in Literature
, and
The Healing Heart: Antidotes to Panic and Helplessness
, which documented Cousins's recovery from a heart attack.
After America became the first nation in history to use atomic weapons, Cousins was asked by author Pearl S. Buck to publicize through his magazine the plight of a particular group: young Japanese women who had survived the radioactive blast but were being ostracized by their society on account of their keloid scarring and disfigurement. Cousins accepted the challenge. He and Eleanor first visited Hiroshima in 1946. A fundraising campaign successfully directed to the
Saturday Review
readership brought twenty-five of these “Hiroshima Maidens” to the United States for plastic surgery, and also provided medical care and education to four hundred war-orphaned Japanese children. The Cousinses adopted and raised one of the Hiroshima Maidens, Shigeko Nimoto, alongside their four daughters. Shigeko Nimoto Sasamori went on to attend nursing school, worked as an RN, and for the past three decades has worked as an international lecturer on the perils of nuclear power. Cousins also awoke the Japanese government to its own responsibility toward the wounded: The Norman Cousins Law, so dubbed by the Japanese government, guarantees free lifelong medical care to all A-bomb victims.
Cousins served as co-chairman of the Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and wrote regularly in
Saturday Review
about the urgent need to reduce the nations' nuclear stockpiles. At the time of his death in 1990, he still believed that strengthening the United Nations was the key to the prevention of nuclear war. It was in large part thanks to Cousins, who wrote and negotiated tirelessly for the rest of his life as an advocate for nuclear disarmament and an opponent of nuclear testing, that the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was ratified during the Kennedy administration. He founded the Dartmouth Conferences, an annual cultural exchange that brought together prominent Soviet and American citizens for the purpose of promoting communication between the two nations during the Cold War. As president of the United World Federalists, his diplomatic skills attracted the attention of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, who all recruited Cousins for diplomatic missions during their successive administrations.
After the widespread publication of
Anatomy of an Illness
, Cousins was invited by University of California Los Angeles Medical School to serve as the first lay professor in the school's history to teach in its department of psychiatry and biobehavioral science. There he founded what became known as the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology to conduct research on the relationship between mind and body, and teach medical students the art of relating to their patients not as cases but as persons, whose experiential input must be recognized as necessary to successful treatment.
Cousins lived joyfully and gratefully with Eleanor in Los Angeles until his death of a heart attack in November 1990.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1979 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Cover design by Kat JK Lee
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3853-9
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
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