This medical history trivia quiz has 60 free questions with answers and walks through 4,000 years of healing, from the Edwin Smith Papyrus and the surgeon Sushruta to Hippocrates and Galen, Avicenna's Canon, the barber-surgeons, Vesalius and Harvey, and then the great 19th- and 20th-century breakthroughs: Jenner's smallpox vaccine, ether at Massachusetts General, Semmelweis and handwashing, John Snow's pump handle, Lister's carbolic acid, Pasteur and Koch, Röntgen's X-rays, insulin, penicillin, the polio vaccine, the first kidney and heart transplants and the first IVF baby. The easy questions are ones most people know (who is called the father of medicine, what Fleming found growing in a petri dish). The medium ones cover the milestones and the people behind them. The hard ones ask about the details: the boy Jenner inoculated, the magazine-worthy bet over ulcers, the pole outside the barber's shop, the queen who took chloroform. Good for medical and nursing students, pub quizzes and anyone who has ever wondered why doctors wash their hands. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Greek physician from Kos is called the "Father of Medicine"?
Hippocrates
He is credited with prognosis, clinical observation and the first description of clubbed fingers.
Q 02The four humours were blood, phlegm and two kinds of which fluid?
Bile
An excess or shortage of any one was thought to cause illness, which is why bloodletting seemed logical for two thousand years.
Q 03Galen based most of his anatomy on dissecting which animals, human dissection being forbidden in Rome?
Barbary apes
He also encouraged students to inspect dead gladiators and bodies washed up on shore to learn human anatomy.
Q 04Who compiled The Canon of Medicine, the 1025 encyclopaedia used as a European textbook into the 18th century?
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
It set the standard for medicine in both medieval Europe and the Islamic world.
Q 05The Edwin Smith Papyrus, the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma, comes from which civilisation?
Ancient Egypt
It is named after the dealer who bought it in 1862 and may originally date from the Old Kingdom.
Q 06Sushruta is called the father of plastic surgery largely for describing which operation?
Nose reconstruction using forehead skin
Many patients were criminals whose noses had been cut off as punishment.
Q 07Trepanning, one of the oldest surgical procedures known, involves doing what?
Drilling a hole in the skull
The word comes from a Greek term for a borer or auger.
Q 08At which university was Vesalius a professor when he wrote De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543)?
Padua
He later became imperial physician to Emperor Charles V.
Q 09William Harvey's 1628 book De Motu Cordis was the first to describe in full what?
The circulation of the blood
He published the 72-page treatise in Frankfurt to catch the city's book fair.
Q 10Ambroise Paré found gunshot wounds healed better with an egg-yolk ointment than with what standard treatment?
Boiling oil
He ran out of oil one night, tried the ointment, and found those patients had recovered while the others were in agony.
Q 11The red and white stripes of a barber's pole recall which practice once carried out by barber-surgeons?
Bloodletting
The original pole had a brass basin at the top for leeches and one at the bottom to catch the blood.
Q 12Which US president asked to be bled heavily for a throat infection, likely hastening his death?
George Washington
Bloodletting rested on Galen's belief that the humours had to be kept in balance.
Q 13In 1796 Edward Jenner tested his smallpox vaccine on James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his what?
Gardener
The words vaccine and vaccination come from Variolae vaccinae, Jenner's Latin name for cowpox.
Q 21Which chemical did Joseph Lister use to pioneer antiseptic surgery at Glasgow Royal Infirmary?
Carbolic acid
Carbolic acid is modern-day phenol; the mouthwash Listerine was later named in his honour.
Q 22Pasteur gave his rabies vaccine to nine-year-old Joseph Meister in 1885 after the boy had been what?
Bitten by a rabid dog
Meister received 13 inoculations over 11 days and survived.
Q 23Robert Koch's 1876 discovery of the bacterium behind which disease is considered the birth of bacteriology?
Anthrax
He went on to identify the tuberculosis and cholera germs and won the 1905 Nobel Prize.
Q 14The word "vaccine" derives from the Latin for which animal?
Cow
Jenner coined Variolae vaccinae, "pustules of the cow", for cowpox in 1798.
Q 15In which year did the WHO certify smallpox as eradicated?
1980
The last natural case was diagnosed in October 1977; rinderpest, a cattle disease, followed in 2011.
Q 16William Morton, who first publicly demonstrated ether anaesthesia in 1846, was by profession a what?
Dentist
Weeks earlier he had used ether for a painless tooth extraction on a patient named Ebenezer Frost.
Q 17Which Scottish obstetrician first demonstrated chloroform anaesthesia in humans in 1847?
James Young Simpson
The drug was supplied by a local Edinburgh pharmacist, and Simpson helped popularise it in medicine.
Q 18Which monarch was given chloroform by John Snow during the births of her last two children in the 1850s?
Queen Victoria
Prince Leopold and Princess Beatrice were the children; royal approval helped make anaesthesia respectable.
Q 19Where was the public water pump John Snow had disabled during the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak?
Broad Street
The authorities removed the pump handle; the outbreak killed 616 people and helped bury the miasma theory.
Q 20In 1847 Semmelweis cut maternal deaths at Vienna General Hospital by making doctors do what?
Wash their hands in chlorinated lime
Doctors' wards had three times the death rate of midwives' wards; he was later committed to an asylum, where guards beat him.
Q 24Who won the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 1901, for diphtheria serum therapy?
Emil von Behring
He was hailed as a "saviour of children" because diphtheria was a major cause of child death.
Q 25René Laennec invented the stethoscope in 1816 partly thanks to which hobby?
Carving wooden flutes
He was examining a young woman too stout for hand percussion to work, and rolled up a tube instead.
Q 26Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895, received which award in 1901?
The first Nobel Prize in Physics
The element roentgenium is also named after him.
Q 27During the First World War, which double Nobel laureate developed mobile X-ray units for field hospitals?
Marie Curie
She had won the 1903 physics prize and the 1911 chemistry prize for radium and polonium.
Q 28Besides the main blood groups, which later discovery with Alexander Wiener bears Karl Landsteiner's mark?
The Rhesus factor
He also co-discovered the polio virus in 1909 and won the Nobel Prize in 1930.
Q 29Willem Einthoven won the 1924 Nobel Prize for inventing which diagnostic device?
The electrocardiograph
His first practical version dates from 1895, using a string galvanometer.
Q 30Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin in 1921 at which university?
Toronto
Banting became the youngest ever medicine laureate at 32 and split his prize money with Best, whom the Nobel committee had overlooked.