The healing power of maggots is not

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