Maggot therapy

Maggot therapy is a biotherapy that involves the therapeutic use of maggots to treat non-healing skin and soft tissue wounds of a human or animal with the aim of cleaning out the dead tissue within a wound.

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HISTORY

Records have shown that maggots have been used for the treating of wound since antiquity.

Military physicians observed that soldiers whose wounds became infested with maggots had better outcomes than those not infested.

Some of this physicians included Napoleon’s general surgeon, Baron Dominique Larrey. Between 1798-1801, Larrey reported during France's Egyptian campaign in Syria that certain species of fly consumed only dead tissue and helped wounds to heal.

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In 1920's,William Baer while at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland identified specific species of maggots and raised them in the laboratory, and used their larvae to treat several children with osteomyelitis and soft tissue infections. He may have been the first in the Northern Hemisphere to have intentionally applied larvae to wounds to induce wound healing.

In 1929, he presented his findings at a surgical conference. In 1931, after treating over 85 children, his findings were published posthumously.

This therapy was successful and performed by thousands of physicians throughout the 1930’s, but soon the new antibiotics and surgical techniques took it's place. In the 1970's and 1980's maggot therapy were occasionally used, but only when antibiotics, surgery, and modern wound care failed to control the advancing wound.

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