Gas leak in Bhopal, India

On this day in 1984, a gas leak from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, spread over a populated area, resulting ultimately in 15,000 to 20,000 deaths and leaving some half million survivors with chronic medical ailments. 1984. 

Gwendolyn Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who spoke of and to the everyday struggles and triumphs of African Americans, died in Chicago. 2000. 

Christiaan Barnard of South Africa performed the first human heart transplant, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. 1967. 

Anna Freud, a founder of child psychoanalysis and one of its foremost practitioners, was born in Vienna. 1895. 

German composer Johann Sebastian Bach married his second wife, Anna Magdalena Wilcken, the daughter of a trumpeter at Weissenfels. 1721.