Clever doctor Gottfried Knoche, his strange desires and mysterious mummies (16 photos)

Genius and madness very often walk hand in hand. Apparently, talent alone is not enough for brilliant discoveries and inventions. And a person must have a specific way of thinking. Like this one, for example.





Gottfried Knoche was born in Halberstadt, Germany in 1813. He became famous for his invention of a special embalming fluid, with which he created dozens of mummified bodies... including his own.



Gottfried Knoche

In 1840, Knoche emigrated from Germany to Venezuela and settled in La Guaira, a city in the north of the country. There he quickly joined the ranks of the local population and founded the San Juan de Dios Hospital, where he worked in 1854-1856.



La Guaira today

Having settled here, Knoche married a local girl and began working as a doctor. The doctor quickly gained a reputation as a philanthropist, caring for poor patients free of charge and tirelessly fighting the cholera epidemic that was plaguing the region at the time.



El Avila National Park



Ruins of Dr. Knoche's hacienda



A passionate, purposeful and energetic physician, in addition to his main job - saving lives - he was also interested in, so to speak, the other side of the coin - the aesthetics of death.



He worked hard to learn how to avoid the inexorable process of decomposition of bodies after death. Knoche began experimenting with unclaimed bodies left over from the war (which was a very, very unusual practice for doctors at that time), transporting them on horseback from the San Juan de Dios hospital to his laboratory located at the Buena Vista Hacienda in Palmar. del Picacho in Galipan. Over time, Knoche developed a formula for a liquid that could be injected into the body to preserve it in its original form without removing the internal organs. The doctor thus preserved several mummified bodies for study in his laboratory.







Knoche foresaw his death and made sure that Amelie Weissmann, his assistant and nurse (according to one version, the woman was his cousin), who was responsible for introducing the “mummifying serum” into the bodies, prepared the composition for his own preservation. There is a version that he asked his assistant to introduce her into his still living body before locking himself in the mausoleum for eternity. Amelie, the doctor’s faithful assistant, whom the locals nicknamed the Witch of Avila, fulfilled his last wish and followed Knoch to the grave in 1926, remaining the guardian of the estate for almost a quarter of a century.



Dr. Thomas Lander, a famous Venezuelan journalist and politician, and Francisco Linares Alcantara, President of Venezuela in 1878-1879, are said to have been mummified by Knoche. Landers' mummy lay in his home for about 40 years before he was buried. In 1929, an expedition to the farm discovered that many mummies had been removed from their niches and scattered on the ground. At that time, few photographs were taken that captured the silent inhabitants of the hacienda.





Buena Vista, located within the El Avila National Park, lies in ruins. The mausoleum was looted, but partially restored. In addition to Knoche, it contains the remains of his daughter Anna (1840-1879), her husband Heinrich Müller (1822-1881) and Knoche’s brother Wilhelm (1817-1874). The doctor's wife returned to Germany because she did not like the isolation and atmosphere at the hacienda, and the fate of Anna's son, Oswald, is unknown.



What is noteworthy is that the first expedition also discovered mummified dogs during their visit, which, apparently, according to the creator’s plan, guarded this strange place and the peace of its inhabitants.



Until now, the exact composition of the substance that the doctor used to preserve corpses has not been discovered. It is believed that his liquid was based on a compound of aluminum chloride, but the exact formula (if one was ever written down) has never been found.



El Avila

Some medical students still visit the mausoleum in an attempt to unravel the secret. As well as fans of extreme sports and scary stories. But soon the ruins will completely swallow up the forests, leaving the mystery of the mysterious doctor unsolved.