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Maggots
The healing power of maggots is not
new. Human
beings have discovered it several times. The Maya are
said to have used
maggots for therapeutic purposes a thousand years ago. As early as the
sixteenth century, European doctors noticed
that soldiers with maggot-infested wounds healed well. More recently, doctors have realized that maggots can be
cheaper and more effective than drugs in some respects, and these squirming larvae have, at times, enjoyed
a quiet medical renaissance. The problem may have more to do with the weak stomachs
of those using them than with good
science. The
modern heyday of maggot therapy began
during World War I, when an American doctor named William Baer was shocked
to notice that two soldiers who had lain on a battlefield for a week while
their abdominal wounds became infested with thousands of maggots, had recovered better than wounded men treated
in the military hospital. After the war, Baer proved to
the medical establishment that maggots could cure some of the toughest
infections.
In the 1930s hundreds of
hospitals used
maggot therapy. Maggot
therapy requires the right kind of
larvae. Only the
maggots of blowflies (a family that includes common bluebottles and
greenbottles) will do the
job; they
devour dead tissue, whether in an open
wound or in a corpse. Some other maggots, on the other hand, such as those of
the screw-worm eat
live tissue. They must be avoided. When blowfly eggs
hatch in a patient’s
wound, the
maggots eat
the dead flesh where gangrene-causing bacteria thrive. They also excrete
compounds that are lethal to bacteria they don’t happen to swallow. Meanwhile, they
ignore live flesh, and in fact, give it a gentle growth-stimulating massage
simply by crawling
over it. When they
metamorphose into flies, they leave without a trace – although in the
process, they might
upset the hospital staff as they squirm around in a live patient. When sulfa drugs, the
first antibiotics, emerged
around the time of World War II, maggot therapy quickly faded
into obscurity.
