Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient by Norman Cousins Page A

detached in the middle of critical passages. Even a phantom footboard, however, provided him with an opportunity to work his feet.
    In an earlier book, I wrote about my experience at the Lambarene hospital when, one night, long after most of the oil lamps had been turned out, I walked down toward the river. It was a sticky night and I couldn’t sleep. As I passed the compound near Dr. Schweitzer’s quarters, I could hear the rapid piano movement of a Bach toccata.
    I approached the doctor’s bungalow and stood for perhaps five minutes outside the latticed window, through which I could see his silhouette at the piano in the dimly lit room. His powerful hands were in total control of the composition and he met Bach’s demands for complete definition of each note—each with its own weight and value, yet all of them intimately interlaced to create an ordered whole.
    I had a stronger sense of listening to a great console than if I had been in the world’s largest cathedral. The yearning for an architectured beauty in music; the disciplined artistry and the palpable desire to keep alive a towering part of his past; the need for outpouring and catharsis—all these things inside Albert Schweitzer spoke in his playing.
    And when he was through he sat with his hands resting lightly on the keys, his great head bent forward as though to catch the lingering echoes. Johann Sebastian Bach had made it possible for him to free himself of the pressures and tensions of the hospital, with its forms to fill out in triplicate. He was now restored to the world of creative and ordered splendor that he had always found in music.
    The effect of the music was much the same on Schweitzer as it had been on Casals. He felt restored, regenerated, enhanced. When he stood up, there was no trace of a stoop. Music was his medicine.
    But not the only medicine. There was also humor.
    Albert Schweitzer employed humor as a form of equatorial therapy, a way of reducing the temperatures and the humidity and the tensions. His use of humor, in fact, was so artistic that one had the feeling he almost regarded it as a musical instrument.
    Life for the young doctors and nurses was not easy at the Schweitzer Hospital. Dr. Schweitzer knew it and gave himself the task of supplying nutrients for their spirits. At mealtimes, when the staff came together, Schweitzer always had an amusing story or two to go with the meal. Laughter at the dinner hour was probably the most important course. It was fascinating to see the way the staff members seemed to be rejuvenated by the wryness of his humor. At one meal, for example, Dr. Schweitzer reported to the staff that, “as everyone knows, there are only two automobiles within seventy-five miles of the hospital. This afternoon, the inevitable happened; the cars collided. We have treated the drivers for their superficial wounds. Anyone who has reverence for machines may treat the cars.”
    The next evening, he passed along the news that six baby chicks had been born to Edna the hen, who made her home near the dock. “It was a great surprise to me,” he said solemnly, “I didn’t even know she was that way.”
    One night at the dinner table, after a particularly trying day, he related to the staff an account of his visit to the Royal Palace in Copenhagen some years earlier. The invitation was for dinner, the first course of which was Danish herring. Schweitzer didn’t happen to like herring. When no one was looking he deftly slipped the herring off the plate and into his jacket pocket. The next day, one of the local newspapers, reporting on the life at the Royal Palace, told of the visit of the jungle doctor and of the strange eating habits he had picked up in Africa. Not only did Dr. Schweitzer eat the meat of the fish, the newspaper reported; he ate the bones, head, eyes and all.
    I noticed that when the young doctors and nurses got up from the table that evening, they were in a