Embalming Machines

Modern arterial embalming grew out of the American Civil War, when battlefield undertakers needed to preserve and return the dead over long distances, and it matured into a licensed trade with its own manufactured apparatus. This wing follows that equipment: gravity-injection reservoirs that used nothing but a column of fluid and a few feet of head pressure; hand-pump and bulb machines that let one operator control flow; the electric pressure pumps that displaced them; the trocars used for cavity treatment; and the cooling boards and corpse-coolers that predated refrigeration. The subject is treated strictly as trade and engineering history — how the machines were made, how they moved and pressurized fluid, and the firms and patents behind them — never as instruction in procedures performed on human remains. It is the mechanical and commercial story of a profession, told through its tools. (This is also where the "C. M. Sorensen embalming machine" auction myth is corrected — that device belongs to the Surgical wing, not this one.)