Ah, the healing power of maggots! From Dawn of the Dead-Flesh Eaters:
It seems that maggots, long neglected by medicine, have come back from the dead.Their resurrection began in the early 1980s when Dr. Ronald Sherman, a researcher at the University of California at Irvine, began exploring their potential benefits for patients with wounds, especially on their legs and feet.
Despite their reputation as disgusting and repulsive animals, maggots — blowfly larvae — are largely harmless. Their life cycle is simple: The flies lay eggs when they find decaying flesh. The maggots hatch, enjoy several meals at the nearest dead-animal buffet, develop cocoons known as pupae and turn into flies. Then everything begins again.
Without blowflies and maggots, decomposition would occur a lot more slowly, if at all, and forensic entomologists would have a lot harder time using bugs to figure out times of death in murder cases.
For centuries, according to Sherman, military doctors have noticed that maggots do a good job of eating dead flesh on a live person. “Soldiers injured on the battlefield whose wounds became infested with maggots did better and their wounds did better than soldiers who weren’t infested,” he said.
In the late 1920s, a former World War I surgeon began trying maggots on patients at Johns Hopkins University, and the treatment soon became common. Herb Nordquist, Donna’s husband, remembers being treated with maggots 60 years ago when he had an infected foot. “It didn’t bother me,” he recalled as nurses removed his wife’s maggots in a doctor’s office nearby. “I had no idea what was going on.”
Antibiotics soon entered the picture, however, and maggots fell out of favor as doctors turned to penicillin and its sister drugs. But Sherman’s research resurrected the critters, and 15 years ago he created a “medical maggot” nursery, using rancid liver as food.
He and his wife now send shipments of 250 to 500 disinfected maggots — $70 plus shipping — to as many as 35 doctors a week. (Since maggots are tiny before they begin feasting on flesh, doctors can put dozens of them into a single wound.)