Gottfried Knoche

August Gottfried Knoche (1813 to 1901) was a German doctor and surgeon who spent most of his working life in Venezuela and is best known for inventing an embalming fluid. Born in Halberstadt, he studied at the University of Freiburg in 1837 and worked in its hospital, and in 1840 he settled in La Guaira, where he treated the many German emigrants farming along the coast. He was known as a charitable man who treated poor patients without charge and was considered fearless in the fight against a cholera epidemic there, his credentials being certified locally by the Universidad Central de Venezuela in 1845. He helped re-establish the Hospital San Juan de Dios between 1854 and 1856. During the Federal War he experimented on unclaimed bodies and devised a fluid that could be injected into the veins to preserve a cadaver without removing the organs, used to mummify dozens of bodies including his own. The source believes it was based on an aluminum chloride compound, but the formula was never found.