If leeches aren’t your thing, you might turn your nose up at maggots. Sometimes found wriggling on rotting meat, these fly larvae are being put to use in modern medicine. According to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Maggot Therapy uses the slimy babies from the green-bottle fly. They are “put into a wound to remove necrotic, sloughy and/or infected tissue”. Maggots can also be used to keep wounds clean and prevent infection.
The maggots feed on a patient's dead tissue. Much like they feed on rotting meat. They then release special chemicals into the wound. It breaks down the tissue into a liquid form. The thirsty maggots drink the "juice" and digest it. Not sure about you. But it’s a hard no from us.
One of the oldest medical practices in history is still being used today. Trepanation, put bluntly, is the act of drilling holes into the skull. It was used to treat a bunch of things in ancient times. Most bizarrely, to pull evil spirits from a person’s body through a small hole in their head. Researchers have found evidence of trepanation being used as far back as prehistoric times. Various skulls were uncovered with signs of holes drilled into them.
Some people survived the procedure, others didn't. As this paper states, “Scraping trepanations evinced the highest survival rate; circular grooving, drilling and boring, and linear cutting were far less successful.” Today, trepanation or trepanning is used during modern surgery. It's also called a craniotomy. And it's used to relieve pressure on the brain, or to perform brain surgery.
While some of the historical medical practices were questionable. Others paved the way for modern medicine. But who knows? Maybe sometime in the future, medical professionals might look back on some of today’s treatments and wonder what in the name of Black Death we were thinking. What medical practices do you find mind-boggling? Let us know in the comments.
