Transcript
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Now the rest of the story. Once upon a time in the dark ages of medicine, in a world devoid of anticoagulants and antihistamines and antibiotics and antiseptics, there was an antidote for just about every ailment, a solitary treatment for myriad disorders. And the ancient prescription was laughter. Laughter. No more than a positive mental attitude. Specifically, merriment. Laughter. Ha ha ha. Laughter. Henri de Montaville was a professor of surgery who taught and practiced around the turn of the 14th century. His prescription for recuperation was mirth M I r t H. A surgeon could be assured of his patient's complete recovery, de Montreville declared, by allowing his relatives and special friends to cheer him up and by having somebody tell him jokes. Conversely, the surgeon must forbid anger, hatred and sadness in the patient. And this was the common position of medieval physicians. Surgeons and doctors disagreed only regarding the form in which humor was to be administered. 300 years past de Mont de Ville's time, Richard Mulcaster and Robert Burton wrote individually and extensively on the therapeutic nature of laughter. During the reign of King George III, there was an English physician, Dr. William Batty, now recognized as a pioneer in the field of mental illness. And not only did he regularly prescribe laughter in the treatment of his mental patients, but Dr. Batty once had a sane young patient with a virtually inaccessible abscess in his throat. And that abscess had enlarged to the point that it threatened the young man with supplication. And finally, after Dr. Batty had exhausted his repertoire of medications and his young patient was about to strangle, the desperate physician resorted to humor. He set his wig on crooked, made silly faces until he had evoked eruptive laughter. And what do you know, it burst the abscess and saved the patient's life. In 1928, an American physician, Dr. James J. Walsh, published an impressive book size treatise entitled Laughter and health. In it, Dr. Walsh attempts to unravel the mystery of why laughter increases one's resistance to disease. We're only beginning to understand. Editor Norman Cousins wrote in 1976 that he had left his way to recovery from a degenerative spinal condition. And this led many researchers to re examine the subtleties of adrenaline metabolism and the occurrence of beta endorphins in the blood and even the electrophysiology of the brain. Almost 700 years after de Mont de Ville forbade his patients to be angry or hateful or sad, stress is now almost universally acknowledged as a potential root cause for some illnesses. And yet Henri de Montdeville was hardly the first to make such a suggestion. For it is in the search for new answers that the old answers are often justified. I quote, a cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. King Solomon wrote those words in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible 3,000 years ago. And now you know the rest of the story.