The course of modern wound care changed one day in the late 1980s because a medical resident at the University of California, Irvine, named Ronald Sherman wore a butterfly-patterned tie. The chief resident of plastic surgery noticed it, recalls Sherman. “He said, ‘Do you know anything about bugs?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I was an entomology major.’ He said, ‘Ever heard of maggot therapy?’”The rest became creepy-crawly history that’s ended up saving countless lives and limbs: a resurgence of therapy using maggots and leeches, which are the only two live animals FDA-approved as medical devices.
Ancient Remedies
Using maggots and leeches on the human body goes way back — the ancient Greek physician Galen referenced them more than two thousand years ago. Striped barber poles, in fact, are a callback to the good old medieval days when you could get some bloodletting done in the same trip to get a haircut. The ball at the top of the pole is said to symbolize the bowl the leeches were kept in, and the one at the bottom is the basin that blood drained into. But the roles of these creatures in modern medicine is a little more refined and tailored to their biology.
