The Medicine of Mirth: The Healing Power of Laughter

The Mayo Clinic reports that laughter can relieve short-term stress, provide long-term health benefits, and may even improve our immune system.

Actress Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) was a big proponent of laughing, saying, " It cures a multitude of ills." Above, Hepburn with her husband, actor Mel Ferrer (1917-2008) on a country road outside Paris, 1956. Ed Feingersh/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The pandemic has transformed the entire world into a dark and frightening place, with businesses shut down, untold millions quarantined in their homes, human beings around the globe panicked by the virus and the uncertainties of the present and the future. It is a time of tremendous tension politically and personally, a time when you can smell the fear in the air and see it in the eyes of masked shoppers at the grocery stores. Spring has bestowed on us its warmer temperatures, flowers, and green grass, but the incongruities between nature’s beauty and the pandemic may only sharpen our black spirits and gloomy thoughts.

Hard times.

The Cure for a Multitude of Ills

Another lady remembered by many of us also endured hard times. As a teenager living in the Netherlands under the Nazis during World War II, she aided the Resistance, lost an in-law to execution, watched Jews being trundled away to their deaths, underwent bombardment from the Allies, was reduced along with her family to eating flour made from tulip bulbs, ended the war ill with anemia and malnutrition, and found her family stripped of wealth and status.