Medicine: Maggot Dentists

Fly maggots eat dead tissue and germs, but do not touch live flesh. This maggot habit the late Surgeon William Stevenson Baer applied to the treatment of festering wounds and bone diseases. He got astonishingly good results. Surgeons every-where are beginning to use the Baer technique.

Dentist George Clarence Dreher of Newark, N. J. pondered the use of maggots for cleaning the root canal completely of dead pulp, ordinarily a difficult procedure. Too nice to experiment in a patient’s mouth, Dentist Dreher got a freshly-pulled decayed1 front tooth—he reported last week in Dental Survey—and put a fat maggot to work on the decay. The maggot was too fat to get into the root canal.

Thereupon Dentist Dreher hatched some germ-free blowfly eggs and fed the larvae for twelve hours on pig-liver. One of these tiny maggots he penned in the pulp chamber of the tooth with a light cotton plug. Three days of work killed the maggot. Another slim maggot then went to work, delved for three days, died. Then a third maggot. After nine days the tooth was cleaner than a dog’s, “with the exception of a thin, hard, white secretion left on the wall of the canal by the maggot.” That coating was sterile.

Twenty times Dentist Dreher made the experiment and 20 times the maggots emptied and sterilized decayed teeth. Simultaneous observation on 50 un-maggotted decayed teeth showed 47 of them infested with germs. Dentist Dreher is delighted in having a new aid in his work, hopes soon to put maggots to work on bad teeth in people’s mouths.