Compassionate Laughter: Jest for Your Health!
Wooten, a nurse since 1969, discovered she could cope better with the stresses of critical care, hospice, and home health nursing by using her sense of humor. So she worked on clowning skills and created her own wacky characters, Nancy Nurse and her whimsical counterpart, Nurse Kindheart, to educate professional and nonprofessional caregivers about the healing power of humor. She now lectures, consults, and develops therapeutic humor programs for health-care professionals. Her book decries the "dearth of mirth" in many hospitals and extols the power of playfulness and humor's capacity to relieve tension, which Wooten illustrates with examples of POWs and the terminally ill meeting tragedy, death, and disaster with laughter. Wooten describes humor's various uses; explores the differences among hoping, coping, and gallows styles of humor; and holistically connects humor to the interrelationship of mind, body, and spirit. Although Wooten aims her book primarily at health-care professionals, it deserves a larger audience.Whitney Scott