Laughter healing  benefits and healing with laughter have become synonymous with Norman Cousins, the man who laughed himself to wellness. Norman Cousins was the editor of SaturdayReviewfor over 30 years. His story began in 1964, when doctors found that the connective tissue in his spine was becoming worse, which is a condition known as Ankylosing Spondylitis . The doctors, one of whom was a close friend of Cousins, said that his chance of survival was approximately 1 in 500. He read about the theory that negative emotions do harm to the body, so he thought that if negative emotions were damaging to health, then positive emotions should improve health. Faced with the real possibility of his approaching death, Cousins thought long and hard and eventually did three things completely contrary to medical opinion. First he began his own research on all of the various drugs he was on. He discovered that his condition was removing Vitamin C from his body and, based on Cousins' personal research, doctors agreed to take him off several of the drugs he was on and inject  him with large doses of this supplement , as Cousins felt this may be his last hope. Secondly, Cousins made a decision to check out of the hospital and into a hotel room. The third thing Cousins did was get a movie projector  and a large supply of funny films. On his first night in the hotel Cousins found that he laughed so hard at the films that he was able to stimulate chemicals in his body that allowed him several hours of pain-free sleep. When the pain returned he would simply turn the projector back on and the laughter would help sleep, and he was able to measure the changes in his body by measuring his blood sedimentation rate , and found that this rate dropped by at least 5 points each time he watched one of these videos. The treatment proved to be so effective that in very little time Cousins was off all painkillers and sleeping pills. He found that the laughter relieved the pain and helped him sleep. He returned to work and wrote about his experimental treatment in his book Anatomy of an Illness. In 1989, it was finally acknowledged in the Journal of the American Medical Association that laughter therapy  could help improve the quality of life for patients with chronic illness and that laughter has an immediate symptom-relieving effect. According to the passage, Norman Cousins used to be a(n)  _  .
writer doctor editor comedian