long ago, but after ancient medicine, there was the use of sterile flys. These were inside small wooden boxes with a screen top. When the sterile maggots were put on a wound they would devour all the dead tissue, leaving only young, freshly formed tissue. These maggots would then hatch into sterile flies. The physician would be able to see these flies and remove them from the wound. It was one way of cleaning up an otherwise messy wound.

Maggot therapy (also known as larval therapy) is a type of biotherapy involving the introduction of live, disinfected maggots (fly larvae) into non-healing skin and soft-tissue wounds of a human or other animal for the purpose of cleaning out the necrotic (dead) tissue within a wound (debridement), and disinfection.

There is evidence that maggot therapy may help with wound healing.[1]Just Sayin...RJS

In today’s world, this story is hard to believe, at least for me it was. When I was promoted to Sales Training, besides entering a completely new dimension and a foreign territory, I was privileged to rub shoulders with an early pioneer. Ralph had been with Lederle Laboratories almost all his young life.
He was obviously quite young when he was furnished an automobile, some drug samples, and told to open up the United States beyond the Mississippi! This was necessary for such a young company because they were totally unknown in any of the western states, and that needed to be corrected. This was all before World War II.
It is hard to imagine, but in that period, there were few drugs to be had and none on a level with current antibiotics or polio vaccine. Most laboratories depended upon production of vaccines for tetanus, diphtheria, smallpox, and such, and so Ralph had aspirin, and sterile flies. He most likely chose a large city on the west side of the Mississippi, got out a current road map and plotted his offensive to make the pharmaceutical company known. It was named after the owner, the New York City’s health director.
Yes, I know I should have asked him more questions, but at the time I was anxious to get my own career started. I suppose this all happened in the middle to late 1930s. With the outbreak of the Second World War, the lab was swamped trying to supply the military’s demand for VDRL antigens so the military could test for Venereal Diseases among men entering the various services.
Only after the war did there amazing breakthroughs in broad spectrum antibiotics. Before that, sulfa drugs were about all that was available for infections. There was one exception for pneumonia. The Lederle Laboratories had thousands of rabbits living in acres of rabbit hutches growing all the known pneumococcus strains.
If a patient was infected with pneumonia, the hospital isolated and identified the strain, then called Lederle who immediately shipped by air the right vaccine. A motorcycle rider would meet the plane, rush the drug to the hospital. Some, a high percentage still died, but it was an improvement. Only when Lederle discovered Aureomycin, a broad spectrum antibiotic, was the death toll sharply reduced.
I personally did not see any of this. I was infected with pneumonia in high school and was hospitalized for a week, during which time I was there I was in an oxygen tent. I received a shot of penicillin every three hours. This was before Aureomycin was on the market. But as a salesman for Lederle, I did see the introduction of several new drugs that made people’s lives better and healthier. We were no longer at the time when sterile flies were used, but there were other large steps to improve the health of individuals. Just Sayin…RJS