Maggots are People Too.

A maggot is a fly larva that enjoys feeding on dead flesh. They look sort-of like large grains of rice that wiggle.

If you have been in medicine for a few years, you will probably have seen maggots chewing on some guy’s foot ulcer. This is sounds pretty nasty, but in truth, maggots can be helpful. They will clean away dead tissue and prevent infection. They have been used for millennia for wound debridement and are still used today in some settings. As recently as WWII, in the days of limited antibiotic availability, wards of soldiers would have maggots applied to open wounds, saving life and limb.

I recently got a foot amputation specimen in the pathology lab. This had a deep heel ulcer extending to the bone (don’t get diabetes people!). I cut into the wound and hundreds of maggots poured out. My instinct was to puke, but then I recalled my admiration for these humble creatures. I sectioned and sampled the foot then placed it in a large jar of formaldehyde. My respect for fly larva was about to grow.

Formaldehyde (or Formalin) is a chemical agent used for fixing tissues. This roughly means that it stops meat from rotting. It turns human tissue firm (M.D.s will recall the feel of the bodies in gross anatomy – in a non-sexual way, we hope) and disinfects by killing organisms. In fact, it is such a good disinfectant that - at least according to the texts that I have read – everything is killed with the possible exception of prions (these cause the spongiform encephalopathies such as ‘mad-cow’, wasting disease of elk, kuru, fatal familial insomnia, scrapie, Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker and Creuzfeldt-Jacob disease. These are called ‘spongiform’ because when you cut up the brains of people and animals with these conditions, they have holes like a sponge – so, aside from not getting diabetes, please don’t ritualistically eat the brains of the dead like the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, ok!).

Anyway, two days after I put the foot in formalin, I went back to pull out an old specimen and I saw something moving in one of the adjacent jars. When I looked closer, it was the maggots swimming happily around, like a miniature koi pond filled with animated rice grains. Again, I gulped the vomit from the back of my throat; my heart filled with love for these beautiful infant flies. I thought to myself: ‘cockroaches are pussies’, and went back to work.