Cousins wrote the 1979 best-seller "Anatomy of An Illness," detailing his struggle with ankylosing spondylitis, a debilitating and painful spinal condition that Cousins was able to overcome through positive thinking and laughter. In that book, which was the basis of a television movie, he also contended that Americans were oversensitive to pain and were "becoming a nation of pill-grabbers and hypochondriacs, escalating the slightest ache into a searing ordeal.".