Norman Cousins

• Born: June 24, 1915
• Birthplace: Union Hill, New Jersey
• Died: November 30, 1990

Biography

Norman Cousins was born in 1915 in Union Hill, New Jersey. He enjoyed writing even in his youth, and following his 1933 graduation from Columbia University Teachers College, he began writing and editing for the New York Evening Post and Current History. He joined the staff of the Saturday Review of Literature, later shortened to Saturday Review, as executive editor in 1940. Two years later, when he was only twenty-seven years old, Cousins was promoted to the position of editor in chief of Saturday Review, and the publication flourished during the nearly four decades he spent there.

Cousins encouraged his writers to openly and eloquently speak their minds on issues of great importance, and he followed his own advice. Throughout his life, he was a vocal contributor to discussions on peace, war, and world goals. An already adamant proponent of world government and compassionate cooperation among nations, Cousins was horrified by the use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, and the events intensified his advocacy of world government. He served as one of the vice presidents of the United World Federalists upon its founding in 1947, later serving as its president, and he delivered more than two thousand speeches around the world to educate people about his ideas.

Cousins also put his words into tangible action. With the support of Saturday Review and its readers, Cousins arranged for medical treatment in the United States for twenty- four young female victims of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, one of whom Cousins and his wife would legally adopt. His readers also donated money to provide medical care for four hundred orphaned Japanese children. In addition, Cousins and his readers assisted a program for thirty-five Polish female victims of Nazi medical experiments.

Cousins argued for a stronger United Nations, vocally opposed the Vietnam War, and spoke out publicly against atmospheric nuclear testing and the nuclear arms race. In the 1960’s, he worked to adopt a Soviet-American nuclear test ban treaty, and both President John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII acknowledged his participation in the treaty’s creation. He received the Roosevelt Peace Award in 1963, the Family of Man Award in 1968, and the United Nations Peace Medal in 1971.

In the midst of his passionate work, he was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a degenerative collagen disease, in the 1960’s and was nearly paralyzed. Although doctors doubted he would survive, Cousins checked himself out of the hospital, placed himself on a diet high in vitamin C, and maintained a positive outlook and a sense of humor. He made an astonishing recovery. He attributed both this recovery and his recuperation from a near-fatal heart attack fifteen years later to his untraditional self-directed treatments, which he chronicled in Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration (1979) and The Healing Heart: Antidotes to Panic and Helplessness (1983).

After retiring from Saturday Review in 1978, Cousins taught ethics and medical literature at the University of College at Los Angeles School of Medicine. In his later years, he received the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism and the Japan Niwano Peace Prize, among other honors. He died in 1990 at the age of seventy-five.