Sonnet 98
by William Shakespeare

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leapt with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flow’rs in odor and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew.
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.


“Sonnet 98” by William Shakespeare. Public Domain.  (buy now)

It was on this day in 1762 that Catherine the Great assumed power in Russia. She accomplished that feat, with the help of her lover, by rallying the army regiments of St. Petersburg against her ruling husband and second cousin, Peter III. As one of the so-called “enlightened despots” of her time, Catherine was a booster of the arts and believed that it would be worthwhile to educate girls. She established the Smolny Institute of Nobel Maidens in St. Petersburg whose purpose, according to its decree, was to “give the state educated women, good mothers, useful members of the family and society.” Girls lived at the school from age six to 18 and were not allowed to go home for visits or see their family members lest they be subject to their relatives’ corrupting influence. Catherine remained on the throne for 34 years, longer than any other female leader in Russian history.

During World War II Florence Blanchfield supervised the work of 57,000 nurses in the Army Nurse Corps who were stationed everywhere the battles raged. But none of those women received the pay or privileges of male officers of the same rank. Appalled by this inequity, Blanchfield worked to change it. In 1947 both the Army and the Navy amended their rules, permitting women to hold full rank. On July 9 of that year, Blanchfield became the first woman ever to do so when General Dwight D. Eisenhower commissioned her as a lieutenant colonel.

It’s the birthday of the man called “the poet laureate of medicine,” neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks (books by this author), born in London in 1933. He devoted his career to studying people with unusual neurological disorders and writing about them so that they seem like real people and not just case studies. His first book was Migraine (1970), about migraine headaches, and it got good reviews. In the 1960s, he started working with survivors of the sleeping sickness epidemic that occurred between 1916 and 1927. These people had been in institutions ever since, still alive but in unresponsive bodies. Sacks noticed that many of them had reactions similar to those suffering from Parkinson’s disease so he decided to treat them with the drug Levodopa. Many of them woke up and were cognizant for the first time in 40 years, but it was extremely stressful for a number of them to have lost so much time like that, and most of them went back to sleep. Sacks wrote a book about it, Awakenings (1973). He said;

“Awakenings came from the most intense medical and human involvement I have even known, as I encountered, lived with, these patients in a Bronx hospital, some of whom had been transfixed, motionless, in a sort of trance, for decades. Migraine was still in the medical canon, but here I took off in all directions — with allegory, philosophy, poetry, you name it.”

In 1990, it was made into a movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

He went on to write several more books in the same vein, including the best-selling book of essays, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), about people living with a variety of neurological disorders, and his book Musicophilia (2007), about the sometimes bizarre connections between music and the brain and the ways in which music operates on everyone from people with severe neurological disorders to ordinary people who can’t get a tune out of their heads.

He wrote, “To restore the human subject at the center, we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale; only then do we have a ‘who’ as well as a ‘what,’ a real person, a patient, in relation to disease.”

It’s the birthday of the artist David Hockney, born in Bradford, England, in 1937. Hockney is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century and had a big impact on the pop art of the 1960s. He grew up in a working-class family and started drawing cartoons in grammar school when he became bored with schoolwork. One of his first works was a portrait of his father, an oil painting that he sold for 12 dollars. Later he received a gold medal in the graduate competition at the Royal College of Art in London. After frequent visits to the United States, he settled in Los Angeles, where he painted his famous series of swimming pools. He said, “I was 18 when I first visited London, I’m very provincial like that, but I must confess the moment I got to America I thought: This is the place. It was more open, with 24-hour cities and pubs and restaurants that didn’t close.”

Hockney’s 2017 retrospective at the Tate Gallery in Britain became the most popular exhibition, receiving 478,082 visitors even before its final weekend at the end of May after a 16-week run.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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