173 Fun Facts About Doctor

Which medical specialist diagnoses and treats conditions of the skin, hair and nails?

Dermatologist: the skin is the body's largest organ, and a rash or sore is sometimes the first sign of a serious illness elsewhere, so a skin doctor may be the first to spot it.

A nephrologist is a doctor who specialises in diseases of what?

The kidneys: nephros is Greek for kidney, while the Latin word for the same organ, renes, gave us 'renal', which is why one organ carries two sets of medical terms.

A pulmonologist specialises in diseases of which part of the body?

Lungs and airways: because failing lungs mean ventilators and life support, many pulmonologists also train in critical care and help run intensive care units.

Which disease forced transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard to give up surgery?

Rheumatoid arthritis plagued Barnard for decades and finally stopped him operating in the early 1980s, some sixteen years after his famous 1967 first; he turned to writing instead.

Which instrument does a doctor use for auscultation during a physical examination?

Stethoscope: auscultation comes from the Latin for listening, and the heart's familiar 'lub-dub' it picks up is the sound of valves snapping shut.

What is the medical term for persistently high blood pressure?

Hypertension is persistently elevated pressure in the arteries rather than a one-off spike; it is called the 'silent killer' because it usually causes no symptoms while damaging the heart, brain and kidneys.

A pediatrician provides medical care primarily to which demographic?

Children and adolescents: the name is Greek for 'child healer', and the specialty exists because a growing child's body differs from an adult's and needs different treatment.

Who is recognized as the founder of modern nursing, known for her work during the Crimean War?

Florence Nightingale, the 'Lady with the Lamp', opened the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas' Hospital in 1860; her polar-area diagrams showed most Crimean War deaths came from disease, not wounds.

Which medical specialist focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of cancer?

Oncologist: the name comes from the Greek onkos, 'mass'; cancer itself is Latin for crab, because ancient doctors thought a tumour's swollen veins looked like a crab's legs.

Which specialist treats disorders of the bones, joints, ligaments and tendons?

An orthopedist (orthopaedic surgeon) treats the musculoskeletal system; Nicolas Andry coined 'orthopédie' in 1741 from the Greek for 'straight child', because the field began with correcting deformities in children.

Who is credited with the discovery of penicillin in 1928?

Alexander Fleming's mould was Penicillium rubens; Howard Florey and Ernst Chain later turned it into a usable drug and shared his 1945 Nobel Prize.

What is the medical term for an abnormally low level of blood sugar, typically under 70 mg/dL?

Hypoglycemia starves the brain of the glucose it runs on, bringing shakiness and confusion and, untreated, loss of consciousness; fast sugar such as glucose tablets or a sweet drink reverses it.

Which type of medical doctor specializes in eye and vision care, and is qualified to perform eye surgery?

An ophthalmologist is a medical doctor and can operate; one, Harold Ridley, invented the artificial lens implant in 1949 after seeing that cockpit-plastic splinters sat harmlessly in RAF pilots' eyes.

What branch of medicine treats and prevents mental, emotional and behavioural disorders?

Psychiatry is practised by medical doctors, so unlike most psychologists a psychiatrist can prescribe medication and order blood tests or brain scans to rule out a physical cause.

Which scan spins X-rays around the body and lets a computer build cross-sectional images?

CT scan: the first scanner was built at EMI, the Beatles' record label, and its first patient scan, at a London hospital in 1971, showed a cyst in the brain.

In 1816 René Laennec invented a standard doctor's instrument because he disliked doing what?

He was uncomfortable putting his ear directly on a woman's chest, so Laennec rolled a sheet of paper into a tube and found it carried her heart sounds clearly without any contact.

The original Hippocratic Oath opens by swearing to Apollo the Healer, Asclepius, and which two goddesses?

Hygieia and Panacea personified health and cures: Hygieia's name shares its Greek root with 'hygiene', and Panacea's means 'all-healing', which is why a cure-all is still called a panacea.

The 1796 experiment that gave us the word 'vaccine' used matter from which disease?

Cowpox, a mild disease milkmaids caught from cattle, shielded people from a far deadlier pox; its Latin name, variolae vaccinae, comes from vacca, 'cow', and gave us the word 'vaccine'.

How did Elizabeth Blackwell get into Geneva Medical College in 1847?

The male students voted her in as a joke: Geneva's faculty, sure they would refuse, left the decision to the students; Blackwell graduated in 1849 as the first woman with an American medical degree.

In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis cut maternal deaths in Vienna by making doctors wash their hands in what?

Semmelweis made doctors scrub in chlorinated lime solution before examining mothers; deaths on his ward fell from about 18% to around 2% within months, yet most doctors resisted the idea and he died in an asylum in 1865.

Joseph Lister pioneered antiseptic surgery at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary using which chemical?

Carbolic acid, now called phenol, was applied to wounds, instruments and dressings from August 1865 after Lister read Pasteur's work on germs; post-operative deaths on his wards fell sharply.

William Harvey's 1628 treatise on blood circulation is usually known by what short title?

De Motu Cordis ('On the Motion of the Heart') argued from arithmetic: Harvey measured how much blood the heart pumps and saw it was far more than the body could keep making, so the same blood must circulate.

Christiaan Barnard's first heart-transplant patient, Louis Washkansky, survived for how long after the 1967 operation?

18 days: Washkansky regained consciousness and chatted with his wife before pneumonia, helped along by the drugs suppressing rejection, killed him on 21 December 1967; Barnard's second patient, Philip Blaiberg, lived 19 months.

Barnard performed the first human heart transplant at which Cape Town hospital?

Groote Schuur Hospital, the University of Cape Town's teaching hospital, hosted the 3 December 1967 operation; the original theatres now house the Heart of Cape Town Museum.

Louis Pasteur is credited with vaccines against which two diseases?

Rabies and anthrax: Pasteur, a chemist rather than a physician, demonstrated an anthrax vaccine on sheep at Pouilly-le-Fort in 1881 and in 1885 gave his rabies vaccine to Joseph Meister, a boy bitten by a rabid dog.

Which Flemish anatomist's 1543 book De Humani Corporis Fabrica founded the modern study of human anatomy?

Andreas Vesalius, born in Brussels, broke with custom by doing the dissections himself in front of his students instead of leaving the cutting to a surgeon while he lectured.

The degree abbreviation MD stands for which Latin phrase?

Medicinae Doctor is Latin for 'doctor of medicine'; the letters run in the reverse of English order because the Latin phrase puts 'of medicine' first.

North American medical schools took the MD title, in place of England's MB, from universities in which country?

Scotland: America's first medical school, founded in Philadelphia in 1765, was set up by two Edinburgh graduates, and Scottish universities awarded the MD where English ones gave the MB.

Han-dynasty surgeon Hua Tuo is recorded as dosing patients before surgery with a numbing herbal powder dissolved in what?

Wine: the Book of the Later Han says Hua Tuo gave patients his 'mafeisan' powder in wine until they felt nothing; the formula died with him when the warlord Cao Cao had him executed.

Karl Koller showed in 1884 that cocaine numbs the eye, beating which Vienna colleague who was also studying the drug?

Sigmund Freud had praised cocaine in print as a stimulant and painkiller but mentioned its numbing power only in passing, so the credit for local anaesthesia went to Koller.

Wilhelm Röntgen received the very first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for discovering what?

X-rays: Röntgen noticed the new rays on 8 November 1895 while working with a cathode-ray tube and soon imaged the bones of his wife Anna Bertha's hand; he refused to patent the discovery.

Médecins Sans Frontières was founded in 1971 in the aftermath of which crisis?

The Biafran famine: French Red Cross doctors, Bernard Kouchner among them, broke medical silence over the starvation of secessionist Biafra (1967-70) and founded MSF in December 1971; it won the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize.

The Rod of Asclepius, the true symbol of medicine, is often confused with which two-snaked, winged staff?

The caduceus, Hermes' winged staff with two snakes, was adopted by the US Army Medical Corps in 1902 and the mix-up spread; the Rod of Asclepius has a single snake and no wings.

Surgeon James Barry, born Margaret Anne Bulkley, performed one of Africa's first recorded examples of what?

A caesarean where both mother and child lived: in Cape Town Barry carried out the first known such operation by a European surgeon in Africa, and the grateful parents named the boy James Barry Munnik.

Galen's anatomy, accepted for some 1,300 years, was based mainly on dissecting what?

Barbary apes (macaques) were Galen's main subjects, since human dissection was forbidden in the Roman Empire; errors that fit monkeys but not people went uncorrected until the 16th century.

Which encyclopaedia by Ibn Sina (Avicenna) was a standard text for Europe's physicians for centuries?

The Canon of Medicine, completed around 1025, reached Europe when Gerard of Cremona put it into Latin in the 12th century, and universities kept it on the syllabus for hundreds of years.

Frederick Banting shared his 1923 Nobel Prize money with which student who helped isolate insulin?

Charles Best, a medical student, was Banting's assistant in the 1921 Toronto experiments; Banting gave him half his prize money, and Macleod did the same for biochemist James Collip.

Dr Virginia Apgar's score is a quick health check for which patients?

Newborn babies are scored 0 to 2 on five signs a minute after birth; in the early 1960s American doctors turned Apgar's own name into a mnemonic for them: Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration.

Which vaccine pioneer asked in 1955 whether you could patent the sun?

Jonas Salk said it when broadcaster Edward R. Murrow asked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine, in April 1955, just after a field trial on more than a million schoolchildren showed it was safe and effective.

Paul Ehrlich's 1909 drug Salvarsan, the first 'magic bullet', treated which disease?

Syphilis: Salvarsan, an arsenic compound, displaced the mercury treatments used before it and remained the standard cure until penicillin took over in the 1940s.

Nobel-winning immunologist Élie Metchnikoff credited Bulgarian peasants' long lives to the bacteria in which food?

Yogurt: Metchnikoff, who shared the 1908 Nobel Prize with Paul Ehrlich for work on immunity, drank sour milk every day to test his theory, and the fermented-milk diet became a fashion for a time.

Elizabeth Blackwell helped Sophia Jex-Blake found which British institution in 1874?

The London School of Medicine for Women opened in 1874 because no British medical school would train women; Jex-Blake led its founding after Edinburgh refused to let her graduate.

The academic title 'doctor' derives from the Latin verb docēre, meaning what?

Docēre means 'to teach', as in 'docent' and 'doctrine'; a medieval doctor was a licensed teacher, and 'physician' was the usual word for a medical man.

The first doctorates were awarded at the University of Paris and which Italian university?

Bologna, the oldest university in continuous operation, began around 1088 and was organised as guilds of students, who banded together to run their own studies.

In the UK, unlike the US, what does the MD degree usually represent?

In Britain the MD is a research or higher doctorate taken after qualifying; the licensing degrees, MBBS or MBChB, are bachelor's degrees, so most British doctors are 'Dr' only by courtesy.

Thoracic surgeon Henry Heimlich gave his name in 1974 to a first-aid technique for which emergency?

Choking: Heimlich described his abdominal thrusts in 1974, and in 2016, aged 96, he said he had used them himself on a fellow resident of his Cincinnati retirement home.

Who founded osteopathic medicine in 1874, the root of the American DO degree?

Andrew Taylor Still, a frontier doctor who lost three of his children to meningitis, gave up on the remedies of his day, announced osteopathy in 1874 and opened its first school in 1892.

What is the US term for the doctor Britons call a general practitioner?

Primary care physician, or PCP, covers the family doctors, internists and paediatricians patients see first; many US insurance plans make the PCP a 'gatekeeper' whose referral is needed to see a specialist.

In Argentina and Uruguay, a white smock much like a doctor's coat is the everyday uniform of which group?

School students and teachers: the white 'guardapolvo' spread through Argentina's state schools after a Buenos Aires teacher argued that pupils' own clothes showed up who was rich and who was poor.

Sir William Osler is credited with creating which rite of passage for physicians training in a specialty?

Osler created the residency program at Johns Hopkins Hospital alongside surgeon William Halsted, and he also took students out of the lecture hall to learn at the patient's bedside.

Johns Hopkins Hospital opened in 1889 in which US city?

Baltimore: when money for the hospital's planned medical school ran short, Mary Elizabeth Garrett and other trustees' daughters raised it on condition that women be admitted on the same terms as men.

The Mayo Clinic's three major campuses are in Rochester, Jacksonville and which Arizona area?

Phoenix/Scottsdale joined in 1987; the clinic grew out of an 1883 tornado in Rochester, Minnesota, after which the nuns who nursed the injured with Dr William Mayo pressed for a hospital.

England's oldest medical college, the Royal College of Physicians, was founded by charter from which king?

Henry VIII granted the charter in 1518 at the urging of his physician Thomas Linacre, who became the College of Physicians' first president; the 'Royal' came later.

The American Medical Association's founders wrote an 1847 code of what?

Ethics: the code adopted at the AMA's founding meeting drew heavily on Medical Ethics, an 1803 book by English physician Thomas Percival; the other main item was minimum standards for medical training.

Which UK body keeps the official register of doctors and can strike them off?

The General Medical Council was created by the Medical Act 1858 so the public could tell qualified doctors from unqualified ones; in 2010 it struck off Andrew Wakefield over his discredited MMR research.

Thomas Wakley founded which medical journal in 1823?

The Lancet, named after a surgeon's blade, printed hospital lectures and blunt reports of botched operations; one, in 1828, got Wakley sued for libel and made the journal famous.

Who publishes The New England Journal of Medicine?

The Massachusetts Medical Society bought the journal in 1921, reportedly for a single dollar, and gave it its present name in 1928; it had begun in 1812.

Who illustrated the original 1858 edition of Gray's Anatomy?

Henry Vandyke Carter, a colleague at St George's Hospital, drew the figures but thought his fee too small, and Gray had Carter's name set in smaller type; Gray died just three years after publication.

The prescription symbol ℞ comes from which Latin word?

Recipe is the Latin imperative 'take', the word that opened a prescription's instructions; the ℞ with a slash through the R is a medieval manuscript abbreviation.

What does the Latin maxim 'primum non nocere' mean?

'First, do no harm' underpins the bioethical principle of non-maleficence; the Latin tag is not in the Hippocratic Oath itself, which promises to keep patients from 'harm and injustice'.

Which 1964 World Medical Association declaration sets ethical rules for research on human subjects?

The Declaration of Helsinki built on the Nuremberg Code, drawn up after the trial of Nazi doctors who experimented on prisoners; the 1948 Declaration of Geneva is the modern physician's pledge.

The word 'quack' is clipped from a Dutch-derived term for a hawker of what?

Salves: 'quack' is short for 'quacksalver', from Dutch kwakzalver, a seller of ointments; the 'quack' part may have meant to croak or boast about one's wares.

Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment, tested by US government chemists, turned out to be mainly what?

Mineral oil: federal chemists who tested Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment found mineral oil, beef fat, red pepper and turpentine, and no snake at all; Stanley was fined $20.

The red and white stripes of a barber's pole traditionally recall which barber-surgeon service?

Bloodletting: the red stood for blood and the white for bandages, and the pole for the staff patients gripped to make their veins stand out while the barber-surgeon opened them.

Trepanning, one of the oldest surgeries, involves drilling a hole into what?

The skull: trepanned skulls with healed edges, some over 7,000 years old, show patients survived; the hole may have been meant to release evil spirits or to relieve pressure after a head wound.

In a hospital, an order marked 'stat' must be carried out how?

Immediately: 'stat' is clipped from the Latin statim, one of the scraps of Latin shorthand that survive from the days when doctors wrote their prescriptions in that language.

A plague doctor's beaked mask was built to hold what?

Aromatic herbs or perfume filled the beak of the 17th-century costume, about half a foot long with two small holes near the nostrils, so each breath passed over the scent before reaching the doctor.

Modern surgeons use medicinal leeches after which kind of operation?

Finger reattachment: the rejoined veins are slow to reconnect, so blood backs up in the tissue; a leech draws it off while the hirudin in its saliva stops it clotting.

The abandoned miasma theory blamed disease on what?

Bad air: 'miasma' is Greek for pollution, a noxious vapour thought to rise from rotting matter and marshes, which is how malaria got its name, 'mal aria' being Italian for bad air.

The word 'humor' in humoral medicine translates the Greek chymos, meaning what?

Juice or sap: Latin rendered chymos as 'humor', fluid, and the four humours live on in the words sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic, for the moods an excess of each was thought to cause.

Which reflex is the best-known one tested with a reflex hammer?

Patellar, the knee-jerk reflex: a tap below the kneecap makes the leg kick through a loop in the spinal cord that never reaches the brain, which is why 'knee-jerk' came to mean automatic.

An otoscope is used to examine which part of the body?

The otoscope lights and magnifies the ear canal and eardrum; a red, bulging drum points to otitis media, the middle-ear infection common in small children.

A Welsh proverb printed in 1866 promised that eating what at bedtime would 'keep the doctor from earning his bread'?

An apple: the Pembrokeshire rhyme, 'Eat an apple on going to bed', is the oldest known form of the saying that later settled into 'an apple a day keeps the doctor away'.

What was the real name of children's author Dr. Seuss, who never earned a doctorate?

Theodor Geisel left Oxford in 1927 without the doctorate he had gone there for and simply added 'Dr.' to his pen name; Dartmouth later gave him an honorary doctorate.

The WHO, whose 1948 founding is marked each 7 April as World Health Day, declared which disease eradicated in 1980?

Smallpox: the last natural case was Ali Maow Maalin, a Somali hospital worker, in 1977; he recovered and spent his later years as a polio vaccinator.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded by the Nobel Assembly at which body?

The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, 50 professors of the Stockholm medical university, chooses the laureates because Nobel's 1895 will named the institute as judge of the medicine prize.

Emil von Behring won the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1901 for serum therapy against which disease?

Diphtheria: Behring found that blood serum from immunised animals could cure infected ones, and the Nobel citation hailed his antitoxin as 'a victorious weapon' against a disease that mostly killed children.

Red Cross co-founder Henry Dunant received which honour in 1901?

Dunant shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 with pacifist Frédéric Passy; his 1862 book A Memory of Solferino, written after witnessing the 1859 battle's aftermath, led to the Red Cross and the Geneva Convention.

American Red Cross founder Clara Barton earned which Civil War nickname?

Angel of the Battlefield: Barton, a former patent clerk with no nursing training, hauled her own supplies to the front; at Antietam a bullet passed through her sleeve and killed the man she was tending.

Galen became court physician in Rome to which emperor?

Marcus Aurelius: Galen had learned to treat wounds as doctor to the gladiators of Pergamon, and the emperor left him in Rome to look after the health of his heir Commodus.

Imhotep, later deified as a healer, is credited with designing what for Djoser?

A pyramid: Djoser's step pyramid at Saqqara was Egypt's first; no account from Imhotep's own lifetime calls him a physician, a reputation that grew over the centuries after his death.

Ancient Indian physician Sushruta made key contributions to cataract operations and which other field?

Plastic surgery: the Sushruta Samhita describes rebuilding a nose from a flap of cheek skin, a skill much in demand where cutting off the nose was a common punishment.

In Doctor Who, the Doctor's time machine is stuck in the outward shape of what?

A police box: the TARDIS has a 'chameleon circuit' meant to disguise it wherever it lands, but the circuit broke, leaving it as the blue police telephone kiosk once common on British streets.

Physician Rhazes reportedly chose a Baghdad hospital's site by hanging up what?

Meat: in the story al-Razi hung fresh pieces at points around Baghdad and had the hospital built where they took longest to rot; his name simply means 'the man from Rayy', near modern Tehran.

Maimonides, the Córdoba-born rabbi, was a court physician under which Egyptian sultan?

Saladin: Maimonides turned to medicine for a living after his merchant brother drowned in the Indian Ocean with the family's money, and became so renowned that he was made physician at the sultan's court.

Paracelsus is credited as the father of which discipline?

Toxicology: Paracelsus's maxim that 'the dose makes the poison' founded the discipline; the Swiss physician and alchemist is also credited with giving zinc its name.

Ambroise Paré stopped treating gunshot wounds with what?

Boiling oil: forced to improvise with egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine at the siege of Turin, Paré found those patients resting while the scalded ones lay in agony; he went on to serve four French kings.

Sydenham's chorea, a childhood illness of jerky movements, was long called which saint's 'dance'?

St Vitus: 'chorea' comes from the Greek for dance, after the jerking limbs; the illness, named for 17th-century physician Thomas Sydenham, is now known to follow a strep infection by weeks or months.

Scottish surgeon John Hunter was a teacher of and collaborator with which vaccine pioneer?

Edward Jenner became Hunter's pupil in London in 1770 and stayed his friend and correspondent until Hunter died; Hunter's characteristic advice to him was 'Why think? Why not try the experiment?'

Which Prussian statesman challenged pathologist Rudolf Virchow, a leading liberal opponent in parliament, to a duel in 1865?

Otto von Bismarck, then Prussia's minister-president, had faced years of attacks from Virchow, a founder of the liberal Progressive Party; Virchow simply declined the challenge and went on opposing him.

Which disease was first described in an 1817 essay as 'the shaking palsy'?

Parkinson's disease: surgeon James Parkinson based the essay on just six people, three of them merely observed in the London streets; Jean-Martin Charcot later put Parkinson's name on the condition.

Hodgkin's disease, named after London physician Thomas Hodgkin, is a cancer of which body system?

The lymphatic system: Hodgkin's 1832 paper on seven patients with swollen glands and spleens went largely unnoticed until Samuel Wilks rediscovered the disease in the 1850s and then named it after him.

What did Alois Alzheimer find in his patient Auguste Deter's brain?

Plaques and tangles: under the microscope in 1906 Alzheimer saw what are still the hallmarks of the disease, which his colleague Emil Kraepelin named after him in a 1910 textbook.

Georges Gilles de la Tourette's main medical contributions were in hysteria and what?

Hypnotism: Tourette studied it alongside hysteria under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière in Paris, yet he is remembered for something else, the tic disorder he described in 1885 that now bears his name.

Robert Koch won the 1905 Nobel Prize for investigations into which disease?

Tuberculosis: Koch announced the tubercle bacillus on 24 March 1882, the date marked as World TB Day; he also identified the cholera bacterium in 1883 and the anthrax bacillus in 1876.

Which physician traced an 1854 London cholera outbreak to a Soho water pump?

John Snow mapped the Broad Street deaths around the pump and persuaded the parish to remove its handle; his 1855 book showed that Southwark and Vauxhall's sewage-tainted water spread cholera.

Which Scottish obstetrician introduced chloroform in 1847?

James Young Simpson, Edinburgh's professor of midwifery, tried chloroform on himself and two assistants one evening in November 1847, then kept using it in childbirth against opposition from fellow obstetricians and the clergy.

Dentist William Morton first publicly demonstrated which anaesthetic in 1846?

Inhaled ether: on 16 October 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital's 'Ether Dome', Morton put patient Gilbert Abbott to sleep while John Collins Warren removed a neck tumour.

Dentist Horace Wells pioneered anaesthesia with which gas?

Nitrous oxide: Wells saw a man injured painlessly under laughing gas at a Hartford show in December 1844 and had his own tooth pulled under it the next day; he declined to patent the idea.

Anaesthesia pioneer Crawford Long studied in Athens and practised in nearby Jefferson, both in which US state?

Georgia: Long removed a neck tumour from an anaesthetised patient in Jefferson on 30 March 1842 but did not publish until 1849, by which time others had claimed the discovery.

Surgeon Robert Liston is linked to the only operation said to have a mortality rate of what?

300 percent: in the oft-told story Liston amputated a leg so fast that he took off his assistant's fingers too; patient and assistant died of gangrene, and a spectator whose coat he slashed is said to have died of fright.

Karl Landsteiner won the 1930 Nobel Prize for discovering what in 1901?

Blood groups: Landsteiner showed that mixing blood from different people could make the red cells clump, which explained why earlier transfusions had so often ended in disaster.

Chemist Paul Lauterbur and physicist Peter Mansfield shared a 2003 Nobel Prize for developing which technology?

MRI scanning: Lauterbur made the first images in 1973 and Mansfield found ways to speed scanning up; in 1978 he climbed into his team's new whole-body machine to test it on himself.

Felix Hoffmann, credited with synthesising aspirin, also re-synthesised which drug sold by Bayer?

Heroin: Hoffmann made it in the summer of 1897 within a fortnight of aspirin, and Bayer sold it as a 'non-addictive' substitute for morphine in cough remedies; C.R. Alder Wright had first synthesised it in 1874.

James Lind's pioneering clinical trial showed that citrus fruits cured which disease?

Scurvy, later understood as vitamin C deficiency, gave the Royal Navy its 'limey' nickname; Lind became chief physician at Haslar in 1758.

'Typhoid Mary' Mallon spread the disease through New York households while working as what?

A cook: Mallon, an Irish immigrant, infected the families she cooked for; sanitary engineer George Soper traced the outbreaks to her in 1907, and she spent some 26 years quarantined on North Brother Island.

Albert Sabin developed which form of polio vaccine?

Oral: Sabin's live-virus vaccine, swallowed in drops or on a sugar cube, was proved in huge trials run with Soviet scientists at the height of the Cold War and became the world's main defence against polio.

Charles Drew's storage research helped create what during World War II?

Large-scale blood banks: Drew's 1940 thesis on storing plasma shaped the Blood for Britain programme and the first American Red Cross blood bank; he condemned the segregation of donated blood by race as unscientific.

Ben Carson led a 70-member team in 1987 to separate twins joined where?

At the back of the head: the Binder twins from Germany were craniopagus twins, and the 22-hour operation at Johns Hopkins used deep hypothermia to stop their circulation during the separation.

Denton Cooley is famous for the first implantation of what?

A total artificial heart: in 1969 Cooley implanted one in Haskell Karp to keep him alive until a donor heart was found, igniting a feud with his former mentor Michael DeBakey that was not patched up until 2007.

As a student, Michael DeBakey devised a pump later vital to which device?

Heart-lung machine: DeBakey, the son of Lebanese immigrants, built his pump at Tulane to transfuse blood from person to person, and it later became a key part of the machine that made open-heart surgery possible.

In 1908 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify openly as a doctor in Britain, became England's first female what?

Mayor: Aldeburgh, the Suffolk town where she grew up, elected her in 1908; she had qualified in 1865 through a loophole in one licensing body's rules, which it then changed to keep other women out.

Dr Mary Edwards Walker, a Civil War surgeon, was the first woman to receive which award?

The Medal of Honor went to Walker in 1865 for her Civil War service; a review struck her name from the roll in 1917, and the award was reinstated in 1977, 58 years after her death.

What greeted Sophia Jex-Blake and six fellow women students arriving for an Edinburgh anatomy exam in 1870?

A mob throwing mud: a crowd of over 200 jeered and pelted the women at the gates of Surgeons' Hall and a live sheep was let loose in the exam room; friendly students then escorted the seven to safety.

Which famous naturalist supported the Edinburgh Seven, Britain's first female university medical students?

Charles Darwin was among the public supporters of the seven, who began at Edinburgh in 1869 under Sophia Jex-Blake; the Court of Session ruled in 1873 that the university should never have admitted them.

Which journalist found the missing Scottish missionary doctor David Livingstone in Africa in 1871?

Henry Morton Stanley, sent by the New York Herald, found the explorer ill and short of supplies at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika and, by his own account, greeted him with the words 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'

After graduating in 1881, Conan Doyle served as ship's surgeon on the SS Mayumba bound for where?

West Africa: Doyle sailed down the West African coast as the Mayumba's surgeon in 1881, a year after serving as doctor on the Greenland whaler Hope, then gave up the sea for general practice.

Which Edinburgh surgeon, Conan Doyle's former teacher, was the model for Sherlock Holmes's powers of observation and deduction?

Joseph Bell could read a patient's trade and travels at a glance; Doyle, once his outpatient clerk, dedicated The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to 'my old teacher' and told him he owed the detective to him.

In 1891 Conan Doyle went to Vienna to study which specialty?

Ophthalmology: Doyle found the lectures' German technical terms too hard to follow; back in London he opened a consulting room where, by his own account, not one patient ever called.

Poet John Keats trained as an apprentice to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and what?

Apothecary: after his apprenticeship with Hammond in Edmonton, Keats worked as a dresser, a junior house surgeon, at Guy's Hospital before giving up medicine altogether to write poetry.

Which American poet was also a lifelong family doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey?

William Carlos Williams, the poet of 'The Red Wheelbarrow', practised in his home town all his working life, and drew on his patients and the everyday America around him for the plain speech of his poems.

Which revolutionary paused medical school for a South American motorcycle trip?

Che Guevara took a break from his studies to travel with his friend Alberto Granado; the poverty he saw on the road changed his outlook, and he qualified in 1953 only to leave medicine for revolution.

Michael Crichton, a Harvard medical graduate turned novelist, created which medical TV drama?

ER grew from a screenplay Crichton wrote in 1974 about his time as a medical student in a busy emergency room; nobody wanted it for 20 years, until Steven Spielberg took it up after Jurassic Park.

Which novel did Khaled Hosseini write before dawn while working as a doctor?

The Kite Runner: Hosseini began it in 2001, rising at four each morning to write before a full day of patients, and went on practising medicine for a year and a half after it was published.

Which Monty Python member qualified as a doctor but chose comedy over medicine?

Graham Chapman put his medical studies on hold for a year to tour with the Cambridge Circus revue, went back and finished them, and then gave up medicine to write comedy with John Cleese.

Sun Yat-sen, physician and founder of the Republic of China, was educated where before medical school?

Hawaii: Sun's elder brother, who had settled there, took him in and paid for his schooling, then sent him back to China in 1883, alarmed that the boy was about to convert to Christianity.

Which physician was Malaysia's prime minister from 1981 to 2003 and again from 2018 to 2020?

Mahathir Mohamad qualified in 1953 and went into private practice in Alor Setar; in 2018, aged 92, he returned at the head of the opposition and defeated the ruling coalition he had led for 22 years.

Hastings Banda, who studied medicine overseas, ruled which African country from 1964 to 1994?

Malawi: Banda's American medical degree did not let him practise in the British Empire, so he qualified again in Edinburgh and worked as a doctor in England; in 1971 he had himself made president for life.

Patch Adams founded which not-for-profit healthcare project in West Virginia?

The Gesundheit! Institute began in 1971 as a hospital run from Adams's communal home, charging nothing; in 1984 it stopped seeing patients to raise money for a full hospital on its land in West Virginia.

In 2025, Dr Mehmet Oz became administrator of which US agency?

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services: the Senate confirmed Oz, a heart surgeon turned TV host, as CMS administrator in April 2025; he had lost a 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race to John Fetterman.

Sex therapist Dr Ruth Westheimer was sent from Germany at age ten to a school in which country?

Switzerland: weeks after the Nazis seized her father in November 1938, her mother and grandmother put her on a children's transport to a Swiss orphanage; she never saw them again, and later trained as a sniper in the Haganah.

Which TV programme aired the tape that got Jack Kevorkian convicted of murder?

60 Minutes showed Kevorkian giving Thomas Youk a lethal injection, and he was charged three days later; he dismissed his lawyers, defended himself at trial, lost, and served eight years.

Which paediatrician's 1946 bestseller Baby and Child Care told anxious parents 'You know more than you think you do'?

Benjamin Spock urged parents to trust themselves and their children; the book had sold some 50 million copies by his death in 1998, and critics blamed its 'permissive' advice for the generation that protested against the Vietnam War.

Which doctor led the NIAID under seven US presidents?

Anthony Fauci ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022; a fierce early critic, the AIDS activist Larry Kramer, attacked him relentlessly in the media but later called him a hero.

Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, trained as a surgeon in which specialty?

Neurosurgery: while reporting from Iraq in 2003 with a US Navy medical unit, Gupta was asked to scrub in, and performed emergency brain surgery five times in a desert operating room.

Gregory House heads diagnostic medicine at which fictional hospital?

Princeton-Plainsboro is a fictional New Jersey teaching hospital; Hugh Laurie taped his audition in a hotel bathroom in Namibia, and producer Bryan Singer, unaware he was British, hailed him as just the American actor he wanted.

Doctor Zhivago was first published in 1957 in which country?

Italy: Milan publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli brought the novel out in November 1957 after the manuscript was smuggled out of the USSR; Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel and was forced to decline it.

Which fictional 'doctor' is, in the novel, a young Genevan student at Ingolstadt?

Victor Frankenstein calls himself 'by birth a Genevese' and is sent at seventeen to study at Ingolstadt, where he animates his creature; Mary Shelley's novel never once gives him the title of doctor.

Robert Louis Stevenson said the central idea for Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde came to him how?

In a dream: Stevenson wrote that after days of racking his brains he dreamed three of the scenes and 'the central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary', and built the tale around them.

Which actor became a 1960s teen idol playing the young intern Dr Kildare on NBC?

Richard Chamberlain was little known when he was cast in 1961; the role made him a star and even gave him a top-ten single with a sung version of the show's theme tune.

Dr Michaela Quinn leaves the East Coast to practise in which Old West town?

Colorado Springs: the series opens in 1867, but General William Palmer did not found the town until 1871, and its saloons would have surprised him, since he declared his new resort alcohol-free.

Which actor played the teenage physician Doogie Howser from 1989 to 1993?

Neil Patrick Harris was 16 when the show began; ABC executives opposed his casting and disliked the pilot, but creator Steven Bochco's contract forced them to film it, and test audiences loved it.

The hospital in Shonda Rhimes's Seattle surgical drama was first called Seattle Grace and later renamed what?

Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, renamed in season 9 (2013) after Lexie Grey and Mark Sloan, who died in the plane crash; the show's title puns on the Gray's Anatomy textbook.

ER was set in the emergency room of a fictionalised version of which real Windy City institution?

Cook County Hospital, the city's big public hospital, was the model for the show's County General; in 2002 the real one left its landmark Beaux-Arts building for a new hospital next door named after John Stroger.

Scrubs is set at which fictional teaching hospital?

Sacred Heart Hospital: Scrubs was filmed in the disused North Hollywood Medical Center, and the title puns on surgical scrubs and a term for a low-ranking person.

Which actor played surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in all eleven seasons of TV's M*A*S*H?

Alan Alda also wrote and directed episodes, the 1983 finale among them; the series ran from 1972 to 1983, more than three times as long as the Korean War it depicted.

Which actor played Stephen Strange in Marvel's 2016 film Doctor Strange?

Benedict Cumberbatch played the arrogant doctor turned sorcerer for director Scott Derrickson; Joaquin Phoenix had been in talks for the part, and Marvel then moved the film's schedule to fit Cumberbatch's other work.

Who played Dr Leonard 'Bones' McCoy in the original Star Trek?

DeForest Kelley had wanted to be a doctor himself, but his family could not afford medical school in the Depression; he played McCoy in the original series from 1966 to 1969 and in six films.

Dr Watson first appeared alongside Sherlock Holmes in which 1887 novel?

A Study in Scarlet, printed in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887, opens with Watson invalided home from Afghanistan and introduced to Holmes in a hospital laboratory by young Stamford.

What is rapper Dr. Dre's real name?

Andre Young (Andre Romelle Young), born in Compton in 1965, took the name Dr. Dre from basketball star Julius 'Dr. J' Erving; he co-founded Death Row Records and Beats Electronics.

Dr Pepper was created in the 1880s by pharmacist Charles Alderton in which Texas city?

Waco: Alderton first served it at Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store in 1885, and early customers ordered it by asking him to 'shoot them a Waco'; the full stop after 'Dr' was dropped in the 1950s.

Doctor Dolittle first appeared in Hugh Lofting's illustrated letters to his children written from where?

The trenches of World War I: serving with the Irish Guards, Lofting wrote illustrated letters home about an animal doctor rather than describe the fighting; The Story of Doctor Dolittle followed in 1920.

Dr. Evil is primarily a parody of which Bond villain?

Ernst Stavro Blofeld: Dr. Evil's bald head, scar, Nehru jacket and lap cat copy Donald Pleasence's Blofeld in You Only Live Twice; Mike Myers played both him and Austin.

Dr. No, the first Bond film, sends 007 to which island?

Jamaica: Bond is sent to investigate the murder of station chief Strangways and trails Dr. No to the fictional island of Crab Key; the crew began shooting on location in Kingston in January 1962.

Which actor played three roles in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, including the title character?

Peter Sellers played an RAF officer, the US president and the ex-Nazi scientist of the title; Kubrick had planned a serious drama from the thriller Red Alert before deciding the story worked better as satire.

ABC's The Good Doctor was a remake of a 2013 series from where?

South Korea: actor Daniel Dae Kim bought the remake rights to the 2013 KBS drama, and when CBS passed on his version he bought them back and took the project to David Shore, the creator of House.

Why did surgeon Martin Ellingham become a village GP in Doc Martin?

A fear of blood: the character grew out of the chatty, friendly Dr Martin Bamford whom Martin Clunes played in the 2000 film Saving Grace, and was remade as a grump when Clunes took the idea to ITV.

Who played kindly family doctor Marcus Welby on ABC from 1969 to 1976?

Robert Young, the kindly dad of Father Knows Best, made Welby the first ABC series to top the season's ratings, yet off screen he struggled for years with depression and alcoholism.

Jack Klugman's Quincy, M.E. was a medical examiner for which county?

Los Angeles County: Quincy is said to be modelled on its 'coroner to the stars' Thomas Noguchi; two episodes about rare diseases, and Jack Klugman's own testimony before Congress, helped the Orphan Drug Act to pass.

New Amsterdam (2018) was based on a book about which real New York hospital?

Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in the US: the show is based on former medical director Eric Manheimer's memoir Twelve Patients, he joined it as a producer, and some scenes were shot inside Bellevue itself.

Which ER star returned to emergency medicine as Dr Michael 'Robby' Robinavitch in the 2025 drama The Pitt?

Noah Wyle, nominated five times for ER without winning, finally took the Emmy for The Pitt in 2025; each episode follows roughly one hour of a single emergency-department shift.

Which veteran actor played the crime-solving doctor in Diagnosis: Murder?

Dick Van Dyke first played the sleuthing doctor in a 1991 episode of Jake and the Fatman; in the eight-season CBS series that followed, his real-life son Barry played his detective son.

St. Elsewhere was set at a run-down teaching hospital in which city?

Boston: St. Eligius was a decaying South End teaching hospital, and the 1988 finale suggested the whole series had taken place in the imagination of an autistic boy gazing into a snow globe.

Which BBC series is recognised as the longest-running primetime medical drama in the world?

Casualty has aired on BBC One since 6 September 1986; its creators pitched it in 1985 as a manifesto protesting that the National Health Service, founded in 1948, was 'in tatters'.

Which Game of Thrones star made her TV debut in BBC soap Doctors?

Emilia Clarke was just out of drama school when she took a small part in a 2009 episode; she was still juggling other jobs to pay the rent when Game of Thrones cast her as Daenerys Targaryen.

Which producer followed Fire and P.D. with the medical drama Med in 2015?

Dick Wolf launched Med on NBC in November 2015 as the third series in the franchise, and within two months a single story was running through episodes of all three shows in a three-part crossover.

In 1929 Werner Forssmann pushed a catheter into his own heart through a vein in his what?

Arm: he slid the tube up a vein at the elbow, then walked to the radiology room to photograph it in his heart; the criticism that followed was so severe that he gave up heart research and became a urologist.

Which actor was the first to play the Doctor when the BBC launched Doctor Who in 1963?

William Hartnell played the role until 1966; to replace him the show revealed that Time Lords can regenerate into a new body when near death, the device that has let it recast its hero ever since.

To prove his ulcer theory, Australian doctor Barry Marshall deliberately swallowed a broth of which bacterium?

Helicobacter pylori: Marshall drank a culture in 1984, developed nausea and bad breath within days, and biopsies showed gastritis; he and Robin Warren shared the 2005 Nobel for overturning the stress-causes-ulcers doctrine.

Why did Barry Marshall's first 30 attempts to culture ulcer bacteria grow nothing?

Technicians threw them out after two days, the routine for throat swabs; the slow-growing bacteria appeared only when plates were accidentally left in the incubator for five days over the Easter weekend of 1982.

Harvey Cushing, the pioneering American brain surgeon, won a Pulitzer Prize for a biography of which physician?

William Osler's son Revere was fatally wounded at Ypres in 1917 and treated by Cushing, then an army doctor; Cushing's Life of Sir William Osler went on to win the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

Male surgeons in Britain traditionally use which title instead of 'Dr'?

Mr: early surgeons trained by apprenticeship and took a diploma, not a university degree, so they could not call themselves 'Dr'; today's surgeons qualify as doctors first and then switch back to the old title.

In Italy every graduate is a 'dottore', so what is a PhD holder called?

Dottore di ricerca, 'research doctor': Italy introduced its research doctorate only in 1980, when every holder of the ordinary degree was already a 'dottore', so the new graduates were given a longer title.