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.
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 ...
