In the 1960s Cousins had an experience that changed his life and that, at the same time, reinforced some of his deepest convictions concerning the nature of the human being. Stricken with a crippling and life-threatening collagen disease, Cousins followed a regimen of high doses of vitamin C and of positive emotions (including daily doses of belly laughter), all in consultation and partnership with his sometimes skeptical physicians. He chronicled his recovery in the best-selling Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration, published in 1979. In the book, generalizing from his own experience and research, he affirmed that "the life force may be the least understood force on earth" and that "human beings are not locked into fixed limitations. The quest for perfectibility is not a presumption or a blasphemy but the highest manifestation of a great design."
When Cousins had a heart attack fifteen years following his earlier illness, he wondered whether it would be possible to recover from two life-threatening conditions in one lifetime, but he was determined that he would. As he was brought into the hospital on a stretcher following the attack, he sat up and said, "Gentlemen, I want you to know that you're looking at the darnedest healing machine that's ever been wheeled into this hospital." Once again Cousins recovered, and once again he chronicled his experience in a book, The Healing Heart: Antidotes to Panic and Helplessness. And once again he generalized from his experience with life-threatening illness to the experience of life threatened humanity. He was struck by the irony that all of his books on the ills of nations did not have the total readership of his one book describing his personal experience of disease and recovery, Anatomy of an Illness. Yet his concern, as he wrote in The Healing Heart, was "that everyone's health—including that of the next generation—may depend more on the health of society and the healing of nations than on the conquest of disease." He concluded the book with a call to conquer war, affirming that "the health and well-being not just of Americans but of the human race are incompatible with war and preparations for war."
The last years of Cousins' life, following his retirement from Saturday Review in 1978, were spent as a faculty member of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine. There he taught ethics and medical literature and continued his research into the relationship of attitude and health; yet he never lost sight of the larger goals of global peace and justice. Just as belief is, Cousins affirmed, an integral ingredient in personal healing, so did he affirm that belief was integral to global healing. And in all this, he believed that communication was also essential: "The starting point for a better world is the belief that it is possible. Civilization begins in the imagination. The wild dream is the first step to reality. Visions and ideas are potent only when they are shared. Until then, they are merely a form of daydreaming."
During the last year of his life, Cousins received additional awards, including the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism and the Japan Niwano Peace Prize.
Norman Cousins died on November 30, 1990, following cardiac arrest, and having lived years longer than doctors more than once had predicted: ten years after his first heart attack, sixteen years after his collagen illness, and twenty-six years after his doctors first diagnosed heart disease.
