Use of Medicinal Maggots in Wound Healing

History Maggot biotherapy was likely an accidental discovery, as flies have always been with mankind, and deposited their eggs on necrotic, foul-smelling wounds. The earliest written mention of maggot presence in wounds is in the Old Testament of the Bible (Job 7:5). However, various ancient cultures including the Mayans are known to have attracted maggots to dressings which were then applied to wounds. In 1829, Napoleon’s surgeon in chief reported that maggots developing in infected wounds prevented further infection and accelerated wound healing. John Forney Zacharias documented application of maggots to Civil War wounds. W.S. Baer is credited as the founder of modern maggot therapy. He used maggots during WWI, then reported high cure rates of juvenile osteomyelitis in practice. He kept a colony of flies, and was the first to realize that Clostridium sp. could be introduced via maggot application. He developed sterilization procedures to address this risk, and due to his efforts, more than 300 US hospitals were using maggots between 1930-1940. With the advent of penicillin and other commercially available antibiotics in the late 1940s, maggot therapy quickly went out of fashion. In the 1980s, biosurgery was “rediscovered”. Multidrug resistant bacteria had hit the scene, and novel means of combating these public health hazards were applied. The use of medicinal maggots increased throughout the 90’s, and in 1996 the first international conference on biotherapy was held (International Biotherapy Society). http://biotherapy.md.huji.ac.il/