A Moment of Science
During World War 1 soldiers' maggot-infested wounds almost never became infected. What was going on?
Before modern antibiotics, doctors sometimes relied on an unusual, but effective therapy for keeping wounds from getting infected. Yep, you guessed it: maggots.
If you’ve ever seen movies about World War I, you know that the soldiers in the trenches often wore bulbous gas masks that made them look like human insects. The masks were necessary to protect them from chemical weapons such as chlorine gas, a noxious substance that could almost instantly suffocate unprotected victims.
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