Creepy Crawling Maggots

by Pascal Bollon · February 14, 2025

Now, don’t be squeamish. Maggots are back in fashion. Maggot therapy is even at the cutting edge of wound treatments in establishments such as the Chester and Westminster hospital. We put green-bottle fly maggots in wounds to cleanse necrotized tissue. And it is faster and better than usual dressings. Would you believe that?

Decades of books, thousand movies have told and shown us that seeing worms crawling in a wound is not a good sign. “His wound crawled with maggots” and a slow panoramic is generally enough to let us know that the wounded is beyond saving… Our collective mind equates maggots and decay, gangrene and imminent death. It is, when untreated. The scientific process of wound cleaning with modern science was once: rinse, remove debris, clean with alcohol, apply antibiotic cream/ointment, bandage to keep out the germs.

Now, we could add: put in some cultivated green-bottle fly (aka French shit fly) maggots. And voila, you have now maggot therapy. It can be a life saver. And so, where once maggots would have been at best a folk remedy to scoff at, in between hedge wizards and witches, you now have once again a legitimate cure.

What will be the next “obvious” ingrained medical knowledge to go?

In the meantime, you can even use maggots for your everyday trophy cleaning, or treating your animals – as my grandparents did! Just bandage that wound afterwards to avoid new germs and flies spreading.

This is the translation from the notebook of my mother Claude:

“Father goes back several time to the same spot if he spotted a beautiful male [animal]. He only shoots if he is sure of hitting the ideal spot to kill the animal instantly. The Blacks share the meat at the end of the week-end, while Daddy keeps the horns or the teeth (cf the Claviers basement).

2 Blacks will carry each animal corpse, legs attached [with ropes], on a stake carried on their shoulder, running at a stable rhythm, a slow trot, but it is necessary to be quick; with the heat, the corpses must be cut as the innards rot fast and the bellies swell enormously. It makes an enormous gas pocket you have to pierce with a knife when you start on the skin; the grease layer lies in the thickness below the skin.

If you keep the animal horns, not all meat is removed, and flies come to lay eggs. Then enormous maggots grow and clean everything to leave perfectly clean bone.

Mother uses the very same maggots to cure an abcess on one of the goats’ udder; the wound is very quickly (…) and very clean, the meat exposed. She protects the goat’s udder with a cloth bag against the return of the flies.”