The Modern Prometheus

Actress Mae Clark was born on August 16, 1910.

Writer and fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975, William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was born on August 16, 1908.

The “father of experimental psychology”, Wilhelm Wundt was born on August 16, 1832. He founded the first psychology laboratory at Leipzig University in Germany in 1879.

Italian monk, cosmographer, and cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli was born on August 16, 1650.

Original fitness guru eccentric Bernarr Macfadden was born on August 16, 1868. Famously suspicious of modern medicine, he composed quite a canon of self-improvement and fitness volumes (below). I really need to look some of these up, such as 1935’s Woman’s Sex Life. How strangely singular. Anyway, he looks like someone who has many things insightful and nuanced to say about the opposite sex.

Also born on August 16th:

Lesley Ann Warren, in 1946, and Madonna, in 1958. Coincidentally they are both actresses in two of my most favorite movies, Clue and Desperately Seeking Susan. Both movies came out in 1985. I watched and loved both that very same year as an 8-year-old and then for the rest of my life.

There is a lot more history for August 16th, including the deaths of Babe Ruth (1948); Elvis (1977); and Aretha Franklin (2018), far too much for me to wrap up neatly here.

For today:

Epithet: “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

Lucky Numbers: 8–64–73–102

Required Reading: Making Old Bodies Young lessons 1 and 2, by Bernarr MacFadden

Diagnosis: Murder