Anesthesia Trivia
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60 free Anesthesia trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This anesthesia trivia quiz covers the science and the surprisingly dramatic history of putting people painlessly to sleep. The easy questions are the ones any curious patient can answer: the three broad types of anesthesia, the gas that makes you laugh, the drug that made Michael Jackson's death infamous and where an epidural goes. From there it moves into the history, from opium poppies in Sumer and the medieval sleep sponge to Humphry Davy's self-experiments and the Japanese surgeon who beat the West to general anesthesia by forty years. The harder end is for medical students and pub-quiz specialists: Crawford Long's unpublished ether operations, Horace Wells's failed demonstration, Morton's Letheon patent, the surgeon who declared it no humbug, who coined the word anesthesia, chloroform for Queen Victoria, the Vienna school and cocaine, lidocaine's original name, curare's 1942 debut, the drug that treats malignant hyperthermia, ASA scores, how often patients dream under anesthesia and the Mother of Anesthesia who kept records of 14,000 cases. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for anesthesia, its drugs and its pioneers before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our human body, medical history and famous scientists quizzes next.
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Q 01What are the three broad categories of anesthesia?
General, sedation and regional or local
General, sedation and regional or local differ in how much of you is switched off. Under regional anesthesia a woman can stay awake through childbirth, while sedation can run from drowsy but talking to deep.
Q 02What are the three basic goals or endpoints of anesthesia?
Hypnosis, analgesia and muscle relaxation
Hypnosis, analgesia and muscle relaxation are produced by drugs acting on different parts of the nervous system, which is why an anesthetist usually combines several agents instead of relying on one.
Q 03Roughly what proportion of patients become aware during surgery under general anesthesia?
1 or 2 in 1,000
1 or 2 in 1,000 is the usual estimate, and most of those patients feel no pain. It is likeliest in emergencies such as urgent caesareans and trauma surgery, where a full dose of anesthetic would be unsafe.
Q 04About one patient in five reports having done what under general anesthesia?
Dreamed
Dreamed, said 22% of patients in one careful study, and the dreams were mostly pleasant and nothing to do with surgery. They were no sign of too light a dose: they seem to come as the drugs wear off.
Q 05The potency of an inhaled anesthetic correlates with its solubility in what?
Oil
Oil: around 1900 Meyer and Overton found that the more readily an anesthetic dissolves in olive oil, the more potent it is. For decades that pointed to nerve cells' fatty membranes; the main targets are now thought to be proteins.
Q 06A general anesthetic usually begins with a fast-acting injection that puts the patient under; what is this stage called?
Induction
Induction. A drug injected into a vein, an approach dating from the 1930s, puts a patient under within about a minute; gas through a mask is now the fallback when a vein is hard to find.
Q 07The pulse oximeter clipped to a finger during anesthesia reads the blood's oxygen level using what?
Beams of light
Beams of light. Oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor blood absorb red and infrared light differently, a trick Japanese engineer Takuo Aoyagi turned into a bedside monitor in the 1970s.
Q 08What is sedation with benzodiazepines commonly nicknamed?
Twilight anesthesia
Twilight anesthesia. The patient stays drowsy but can answer the team and breathe unaided, yet often remembers little afterwards; painkillers are added because the sedatives don't dull pain.
Q 09An epidural stops outside the spine's protective membranes; a spinal anesthetic is injected through them into what?
The cerebrospinal fluid
The cerebrospinal fluid. A spinal is a single shot into the fluid of the subarachnoid space and works almost at once; an epidural's thin tube stays in place so the dose can be topped up.
Q 10Why does blood pressure commonly drop after a spinal or epidural block?
It causes arterial and venous vasodilation
It causes arterial and venous vasodilation. The drug also numbs the nerves that keep blood vessels tight, so the vessels relax and less blood flows back to the heart.
Q 11Anesthetists give every surgical patient an ASA grade from 1 to 6; what does it rate?
Their overall health
Their overall health. Grade 1 is a fit, healthy person and grade 6 a brain-dead organ donor; the scale dates from 1941, when anesthetists wanted one shared yardstick for comparing their results.
Q 12What do anesthetists call the final phase of a general anesthetic, when the patient wakes?
Emergence
Emergence. Waking is more than the drugs wearing off: a 2014 study of anesthetised rodents found the brain steps through a set of activity 'hubs' in order before consciousness returns.
Q 13Postoperative cognitive dysfunction, a mental fog that can linger for months after major surgery, mainly threatens which patients?
Q 21Why did Hanaoka Seishu's 1804 general anesthetic stay unknown in the West for decades?
Japan was closed
Japan was closed to foreigners until the 1850s, by which time the West had ether. Hanaoka had spent some 20 years perfecting his herbal brew, and his wife, who volunteered to test it, lost her sight.
Q 22The first documented patient under general anesthesia, a 60-year-old Japanese woman in 1804, had which disease?
Breast cancer
Breast cancer. Kan Aiya slept through the removal of her tumour and went home, and her surgeon went on to perform more than 150 such operations before his death in 1835.
Q 23Which Georgia doctor removed a tumor under ether on 30 March 1842 but did not publish until 1849?
Crawford Long
Adults over 60
Adults over 60. Its cause is still unclear: the body's inflammatory response to the operation is a leading suspect, and the anesthetic itself may not be to blame.
Q 14Which ancient people are said to have cultivated the opium poppy as early as 3400 BCE?
The Sumerians
The Sumerians. They are said to have called the poppy hul gil, the 'joy plant', and to have passed it on to the Assyrians, though some scholars doubt the term meant opium at all.
Q 15The 2nd-century Chinese surgeon Hua Tuo reportedly knocked patients out by dissolving his herbal powder mafeisan in what?
Wine
Wine. The recipe died with him: the warlord Cao Cao had Hua Tuo executed, his writings were burned, and the formula has been lost ever since.
Q 16What are Inca shamans said to have chewed and spat into skull wounds to numb them?
Coca leaves
Coca leaves. No record confirms the practice, only later suggestion, but the surgery itself was real and skilled: about four in five Inca-era patients survived having their skulls opened.
Q 17What was the medieval soporific sponge soaked in?
Opium, mandragora and hemlock juice
Opium, mandragora and hemlock juice. The sponge was dried, then wetted again just before surgery and held to the patient's nose until sleep came.
Q 18Which 16th-century physician noted that chickens dosed with ether fell into a long sleep and woke unharmed?
Paracelsus
Paracelsus. He wrote that his 'sweet vitriol' quieted suffering and relieved pain, yet never tried it on patients; the jump from chicken to operating table took another 300 years.
Q 19Who discovered nitrous oxide in 1772?
Joseph Priestley
Joseph Priestley. He made the gas by heating iron filings dampened with nitric acid but never tried breathing it himself, so its strange effects went unnoticed for a quarter of a century.
Q 20Which chemist experimented on himself with nitrous oxide in 1799 and gave the gas its famous nickname?
Humphry Davy
Humphry Davy. Breathing the gas dulled the ache of a wisdom tooth, and he wrote that it might be used in surgery, a hint nobody followed up for more than 40 years.
Crawford Long. He held back because he wanted to repeat the result until he was sure, and so lost the credit in his lifetime; National Doctors' Day now falls on 30 March, the date of his operation.
Q 24Which dentist's 1845 demonstration of nitrous oxide in Boston failed when the patient cried out?
Horace Wells
Horace Wells. A day after watching a showman's volunteer injure his leg without noticing, Wells had his own wisdom tooth pulled painlessly; the Boston failure brought ridicule that hurt him deeply.
Q 25Who gave the first successful public demonstration of ether anesthesia on 16 October 1846?
William T. G. Morton
William T. G. Morton. He nearly missed it, arriving late because he was still adjusting his inhaler; he later asked Congress for a $100,000 reward, but rival claimants blocked it.
Q 26What did surgeon John Collins Warren reportedly say after the 1846 public demonstration of ether?
Gentlemen, this is no humbug
Gentlemen, this is no humbug. No eyewitness report from 1846 records the line; it first appeared in an 1859 biography, three years after Warren's death, and historians doubt he ever said it.
Q 27Under what invented name was ether patented in 1846 to disguise what it really was?
Letheon
Letheon. The name borrowed the Greek word for forgetfulness, as in the mythical river Lethe, but the vapour was soon recognised as plain ether, and surgeons used it freely whatever the patent said.
Q 28Why are patients told not to eat for hours before a general anesthetic?
Stomach contents can enter the lungs
Stomach contents can enter the lungs. Anesthesia switches off the gag and cough reflexes that guard the airway; the lung injury that can follow is named after Curtis Mendelson, who described it in 1946 in women anesthetised in labour.
Q 29Who proposed the words anesthesia and anesthetic in an 1846 letter?
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Oliver Wendell Holmes. 'Everybody wants to have a hand in a great discovery,' the Boston physician and poet wrote, offering only a name; his son and namesake became a Supreme Court justice.
Q 30Which Scottish obstetrician first demonstrated the anesthetic properties of chloroform on humans in 1847?
James Young Simpson
James Young Simpson. He and two assistants inhaled it one evening in the dining room of his Edinburgh home and all passed out; within weeks he had published his account.