April 16

The emperor Otho took his own life on this day after defeat at the first Battle of Bedriacum, ending a three-month reign that ancient writers praised for its restraint.

Joachim Menant, the French scholar who advanced the reading of cuneiform and the classification of Mesopotamian cylinder seals, was born in 1820.

Bernadette Soubirous, the visionary of Lourdes who lived her later years as a Sister of Charity at Nevers, died at the Saint-Gildard convent.

Rosalind Franklin, the British chemist whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA were central to determining its structure and who also studied viruses and carbon materials, died in London in 1958.