December 3

Francis Xavier, the Jesuit missionary who carried Christianity across Asia, died on Shangchuan Island off the Chinese coast.

Edward Hincks, the Irish clergyman who helped decipher Mesopotamian cuneiform alongside Rawlinson and Oppert, died at his rectory in Killyleagh.

Assyriologist George Smith read his translation of the Babylonian flood story, part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, before the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London.

In Cape Town, a surgical team led by Christiaan Barnard performed the first human-to-human heart transplant, a landmark in modern medicine that opened the field of organ transplantation.