Maggots
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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.
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