Doctor explains concerns about the maggot scene from House of the Dragon

The latest episode of House of the Dragon featured a scene where Grand Maester Mellos treats King Viserys for a wounded finger by having him plunge the affected digit, which he cut on the Iron Throne, into a bowl of maggots, the creepy crawly grubby things that eventually turn into flies.

I think a lot of people instinctively recoil from this, because who wants a bunch of wriggly white worms crawling all over your skin, but maggot therapy has been in use for millennia and actually can be effective in getting rid of dead skin. Dr. Yamni Nigam, professor of health care science at Swansea University, broke it down for Inverse. “The oldest record of the positive association between maggots and human wounds is in the Bible, in the book of Job,” she said. “We know there are reports of ancient tribes and cultures, in the Mayan Indian tribe they were known to soak cattle blood on white cloth and hang it up to the sun where it was infested with flies that laid their eggs, they would hatch into maggots. The minute that that cloth was wriggling, they’d put it on various lesions.”

Maggots are effective at treating wounds because they only eat dead tissue, which we don’t want on our bodies. “It will starve on healthy tissue,” Nigam said. Although you might think that doctors stopped using maggots back in medieval times, there’s been a revival in recent years. “We used antibiotics for everything,” Nigram explained. “We’d take them if we had an itch or a sore throat or whatever. It was fab until the ’80s when we really realized that we are losing this battle against bacteria because they’re evolving resistance to all of our drugs.” These days, maggots are FDA-approved and used to treat chronic wounds like diabetic foot ulcers and pressure ulcers.

King Viserys was right to let maggots wriggle all over his wounded finger

Basically, yay maggots. Although Dr. Nigam sees a danger in them appearing on House of the Dragon, a show where medical procedures are assumed to be backwards; in the premiere episode, for example, Mellos wants to use leeches to treat a wound on Viserys’ back, and that practice has been proved useless.

“What I really don’t want is that he will die because of his wounds,” Nigam said. “I hope they don’t show that maggots weren’t able to help because we know that maggots can really help wounds. They’ve saved so many limbs from amputation, so many lives. It’s all in the literature.”

I guess we’ll have to keep watching new episodes of House of the Dragon on HBO and HBO Max every Sunday night to see what happens.

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