Comparative responses of small and medium sized primates, both live and embalmed, to impact stress.

Embalmed cadavers have been used extensively to study impact dynamics but the results seem inconclusive to us. To collect statistically valid data eventually allowing extrapolation to humans, squirrel and rhesus monkeys, (both alive and anaesthetized and dead and embalmed) were impacted using a linear accelerator. Our results suggest that embalmed tissue response is not representative of live tissue response. This conclusion is at variance with other's finding.