Medical History Trivia
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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
Hippocrates, born on Kos around 460 BC, is credited with prognosis, bedside observation and the first description of clubbed fingers, which are called Hippocratic fingers.
Q 02The four humours were blood, phlegm and two kinds of which fluid?
Bile
Bile came in two kinds, yellow and black; with blood and phlegm they made the four humours, and an excess or shortage of any one was thought to cause illness.
Q 03Galen based most of his anatomy on dissecting which animals, human dissection being forbidden in Rome?
Barbary apes
Barbary apes (macaques) were his main model because Roman law forbade human dissection, which is why Galen's anatomy carried errors, such as a five-lobed liver, into the Renaissance.
Q 04Who compiled The Canon of Medicine, the 1025 encyclopaedia used as a European textbook into the 18th century?
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
Ibn Sina (Avicenna) completed the Canon in 1025; it was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the 12th century and set the standard in medieval Europe and the Islamic world.
Q 05The Edwin Smith Papyrus, the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma, comes from which civilisation?
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt produced it around 1600 BC, probably copying an Old Kingdom original; it is named after Edwin Smith, the American dealer who bought it in Luxor in 1862.
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
Drilling a hole in the skull is trepanning, from the Greek trypanon, a borer; healed trepanned skulls from the Neolithic show many patients survived the operation.
Q 08At which university was Vesalius a professor when he wrote De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543)?
Padua
Vesalius taught anatomy at Padua from 1537, basing the Fabrica on his own dissections; he then left to become 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
The circulation of the blood, pumped round the body by the heart, was Harvey's thesis; the 72-page treatise was printed in Frankfurt in 1628 to reach 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
Boiling oil was poured into gunshot wounds to cauterize them; at the siege of Turin in 1537 Paré ran out, used a yolk, rose-oil and turpentine salve, and found those patients fared better.
Q 11The red and white stripes of a barber's pole recall which practice once carried out by barber-surgeons?
Bloodletting
Bloodletting was a barber-surgeon's trade: the red stripe stands for blood and the white for bandages, and the original pole carried brass basins for leeches and for the blood drawn.
Q 12Which US president asked to be bled heavily for a throat infection, likely hastening his death?
George Washington
George Washington was bled of several pints of blood in a single day for a throat infection in December 1799 and died that night at Mount Vernon, aged 67.
Q 13In 1796 Edward Jenner tested his smallpox vaccine on James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his what?
Gardener
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
Bitten by a rabid dog in Alsace on 4 July 1885, Meister was brought to Paris two days later; he 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
Anthrax: in 1876 Koch showed Bacillus anthracis caused the disease by growing it and reproducing the infection in mice; he later identified the tuberculosis and cholera germs and won the 1905 Nobel Prize.
Gardener: on 14 May 1796 Jenner inoculated James Phipps, his gardener's son, with matter from a pox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes's hand, then exposed the boy to smallpox without effect.
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 World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated on 8 May 1980; the last natural case was Ali Maow Maalin in Somalia in October 1977, and rinderpest followed in 2011.
Q 16William Morton, who first publicly demonstrated ether anaesthesia in 1846, was by profession a what?
Dentist
Dentist William Morton had used ether to extract a tooth painlessly from Ebenezer Frost on 30 September 1846 before the public demonstration at Massachusetts General Hospital on 16 October.
Q 17Which Scottish obstetrician first demonstrated chloroform anaesthesia in humans in 1847?
James Young Simpson
James Young Simpson tried chloroform on himself and two colleagues at his Edinburgh home on 4 November 1847, with the drug supplied by local pharmacists Duncan, Flockhart & Co.
Q 18Which monarch was given chloroform by John Snow during the births of her last two children in the 1850s?
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria received chloroform from John Snow for the births of Prince Leopold in 1853 and Princess Beatrice in 1857, and her approval made anaesthesia in childbirth respectable.
Q 19Where was the public water pump John Snow had disabled during the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak?
Broad Street
The Broad Street pump's handle was removed on 8 September 1854 after Snow mapped deaths around it; the outbreak killed 616 people and undermined 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
Wash their hands in chlorinated lime was the order from May 1847; the doctors' ward death rate fell from around 10 percent toward the midwives' level, yet Semmelweis died in an asylum in 1865.
Q 24Who won the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 1901, for diphtheria serum therapy?
Emil von Behring
Emil von Behring received the inaugural 1901 prize for serum therapy against diphtheria, then a major killer of children, and was hailed as a 'saviour of children'.
Q 25René Laennec invented the stethoscope in 1816 partly thanks to which hobby?
Carving wooden flutes
Carving wooden flutes was a pastime that suited Laennec to turning his own instrument; in 1816 he rolled a paper tube to listen to a stout young woman's chest, then made a wooden one.
Q 26Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895, received which award in 1901?
The first Nobel Prize in Physics
The first Nobel Prize in Physics went to Röntgen in 1901 for the rays he discovered in Würzburg in November 1895; he donated the prize money to his university, and element 111 is roentgenium.
Q 27Which scientist developed mobile X-ray units for French field hospitals in the First World War?
Marie Curie
Marie Curie, physics laureate in 1903 and chemistry laureate in 1911, equipped some 20 mobile X-ray vans nicknamed 'petites Curies' and drove one to the front herself.
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
The electrocardiograph earned Einthoven the 1924 prize; his string galvanometer of 1901-03 gave the first practical recordings, and he named the P, Q, R, S and T waves.
Q 30Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin in 1921 at which university?
Toronto
At the University of Toronto, in J.J.R. Macleod's lab, Banting and Best extracted insulin in summer 1921; Banting shared his 1923 Nobel money with Best, whom the committee had passed over.