From Richard Dight
Your correspondents (Letters, 3 June) are right to criticise Feedback’s dismissal of Alexander Flemming’s belief in the benefits of using maggots in healing wounds (13 May).
During the successful first ascent of Annapurna in 1950, Maurice Hertzog, the leader of the expedition, together with other members, suffered very severe frostbite. After a horrendous journey back to “civilisation” they arrived in Delhi. When Oudot the Medical Officer “took off my [Hertzog’s] dressings he found that my foot was harbouring a lot of wriggling maggots. At the approach of the surgeon’s tweezers, they withdrew into their holes. By the time we reached Paris these maggots had grown huge, and there was quite a half-a-pound of them. At first I was horrified – I was being spared nothing! I never got over my horror, in spite of Oudot’s paternal explanation that maggots would clean wounds more effectually than any modern product. They were even, he said, deliberately introduced into certain wounds.”
Hertzog lived to tell his story in the book Annapurna, from which the quotation is taken. He continued to mountaineer, less a number of fingers and toes.
