Because of the apparent value of their maggots in medicine, Department of Agriculture entomologists last week zealously bred two of the more than 30,000 kinds of known flies.* The entomologists were ...

WASHINGTON -- Think of these wriggly little creatures not as, well, gross, but as miniature surgeons: Maggots are making a medical comeback, cleaning out wounds that just won't heal. Wound-care ...

Take two maggots and call me in the morning. Diana Dupuy was an otherwise healthy woman who had bunion surgery. When her cast came off, she found that she had a wound that wasn’t healing very well.

“This research advances our understanding of how and why maggot therapy helps wounds heal faster,” pathologist Ronald Sherman, board chair of the BioTherapeutics, Education and Research Foundation in ...

For most people, maggots and leeches are gross and disgusting. Even though they were once used medically, most modern practitioners are put off by these creatures as much as their patients are. But ...

Maggots, leeches, scorpions, toads, newts, bats, lizards, goats and spider venom: "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes." Of course the "wicked something" in the quote was a ...

Science writer Mary Roach is not easily repulsed. While researching her latest book, Grunt, Roach learned all about the medicinal use of maggots in World War I. She also purposely sniffed a putrid ...

The urine of unborn babies is an excellent vulnerary. Wounds and ulcers promptly heal under the bland influence of a remarkable chemical, allantoin, which such urine contains. Allantoin also occurs in ...