Medicine: Healing Maggots

Because of the apparent value of their maggots in medicine, Department of Agriculture entomologists last week zealously bred two of the more than 30,000 kinds of known flies.* The entomologists were laboring at the instance of Dr. William Stevenson Baer of Baltimore. Dr. Baer, is clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at Johns Hopkins and orthopedic surgeon of a half-dozen Baltimore hospitals.

When he was surgeon general of the orthopedic section of the American Expeditionary Forces’ medical service, he noted a strange coincidence. Many a shell-broken soldier lay unattended in the fields until his lacerations were alive with maggots. Every one should have died of blood poisoning. But, remarkably, many recovered quickly.

For a decade Dr. Baer pondered the coincidence. Medieval doctors, he knew, used to, apply maggots to festering sores, a gross, unlearned practice long abandoned. But maggots are scavengers of the offal they live in. Might it not be that the maggots in his War cases ate up the infected tissue debris, thus preventing blood poisoning? And might they not have secreted something which stimulated the growth of healthy tissue?

Two years ago he decided to experiment on stubborn cases of osteomyelitis. Osteomyelitis is an infectious inflammation of the bone marrow or of the marrow and the bone. The bone rots, and then adjacent flesh. It is more common in children than in adults. It is difficult to cure. If unrestrained it may kill quickly or may last for years. The usual treatment is to cut out the decayed bone and flesh, often repeatedly.

He developed a method of sterilizing fly eggs in mercury bichloride solution and incubating them until they hatched into sterile maggots. The Department of Agriculture’s job is to develop a method of quantity production. The flies used are the bluebottle (Calliphora erythrocephala) and the greenbottle (Lucilia caesar).

Warranting the labor is the fact that Dr. Baer has treated 300 cases of young and old osteomyelitis with his maggots. Every one of the children and four out of five of the adults were cured.

*Insects are the most numerous and most widespread of all animal species. Entomologists discovered some 8,000 new kinds last year, have classified about 500,000 kinds, estimate that two to ten million kinds exist. True insects have three parts to their bodies—head, thorax, abdomen—and three pairs of legs and, usually, two pairs of wings attached to the thorax. Smallest insects are 1/100 in. long, scarcely discernible to the human eye. There is a chunky beetle (Macrodontia cervicovnis) 6 in. long, and some stick-insects reach 13-in. in length. Insect with the greatest wingspread is the moth Erebus agrippina, spread 11 in. But a fossil dragon fly had a 2-ft. spread.