I first encountered the story of Norman Cousins in college, and for decades I remembered it with remarkable confidence.
Cousins had terminal cancer. He left the hospital, rented comedy films, laughed constantly, and somehow laughed himself into remission.
It was a terrific story. Clean, hopeful, and easy to repeat. It was also not the story Cousins told.
He had suffered from a severe, disabling illness that physicians believed might be irreversible, not terminal cancer. His account involved medical care, large doses of vitamin C, changes in his surroundings, prolonged sleep, and comedy films that he believed gave him periods of meaningful pain relief. When Cousins eventually wrote about the experience in The New England Journal of Medicine, he acknowledged that one case carried little scientific weight and explained that he had hesitated to tell the story because he did not want to create false hope.
My memory had quietly rewritten it anyway.
It removed the qualifications, discarded the co…
