March 26

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and author of Man's Search for Meaning, was born in Vienna.

Richard Allen, founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, died at his home in Philadelphia.

George Smith, the self-taught British scholar whose reading of the Gilgamesh tablets reopened Babylonian literature to the modern world, was born in London.

Robert Koldewey opened his excavations at Babylon, work that would lay bare the Ishtar Gate and the plan of Nebuchadnezzar's city.

Baba Hari Dass, a silent monk and Ashtanga Yoga teacher who later inspired the Mount Madonna Center in California, was born near Almora in the Himalayan foothills.

Pierre Lacau, the antiquities director who oversaw the Tutankhamun discovery, died in France.

Freda Bedi, the English-born teacher who became the first Western woman to take full ordination in Tibetan Buddhism, died on this day in 1977.

Swami Smaranananda, sixteenth president of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, died in Kolkata at the age of 95.

Medical researcher Jonas Salk announced on national radio that he had successfully tested a vaccine against poliomyelitis, then a widely feared disease.