Maggot Therapy
During World War One, maggots were an accepted treatment for infected wounds. However, you should be aware of the following before you decide to use maggots to eat infected tissue:
You must expose the wound to flies in order to introduce maggots. Because of their filthy habits, flies are likely to introduce other bacteria to the wound, possibly causing more complications.
Maggots will invade live, healthy tissue when the dead tissue is gone or not readily available.
You should consider maggot therapy despite its hazards when you do not have antibiotics and the wound has become severely infected, does not heal, and ordinary debridement is impossible.
To use maggot therapy, proceed as follows:
Expose the wound to flies for one day and then cover the wound.
Check daily for maggots.
Once maggots develop, keep wound covered, but check daily.
Remove all maggots once they have cleaned our all dead tissue and before they start on healthy tissue. Increased pain and bright red blood in the wound indicate that the maggots have reached healthy tissue.
Flush the wound repeatedly with sterile water or fresh urine to remove the maggots.
Check the wound every four hours for several days to ensure all maggots have been removed.
Bandage the wound and treat it as any other wound. It should heal normally.
Source is FM 21-76
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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