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50 free Medicinal Plants trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
A surprising share of the pharmacy began as a plant someone chewed, brewed or feared. Willow bark became a painkiller, foxglove became a heart drug, a South American tree bark became the first malaria cure, and a pink flower tested against diabetes turned out to fight leukaemia instead. Behind each one is a chemist with a date, a folk tradition with a claim, and usually a good story. These 50 questions stay on the history of science and botany: which plant yielded which compound, who isolated it and when, where the plant grows, and what Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, the Greek herbals and the Victorian apothecaries said it was for. Herbal-remedy claims appear as claims, not advice, and every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something. Play it if you like your trivia with a dose of chemistry and colonial history, or print it for a science class, a garden club or a pub round.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Oseltamivir, sold as Tamiflu, was first made from shikimic acid extracted from which Chinese spice?
Star anise
Star anise was for years the only source of Tamiflu's shikimic acid, so pandemic stockpiling strained the spice supply until E. coli fermentation took over part of production by 2006.
Q 02Which flower, screened in the 1950s as a diabetes remedy, instead yielded the cancer drugs vinblastine and vincristine?
Madagascar periwinkle
Madagascar periwinkle, also called graveyard plant and bright eyes, gave up its vinca alkaloids during 1950s screening for anti-diabetic drugs and is now farmed for chemotherapy.
Q 03Which cocktail began with British officers in the Raj making their bitter daily antimalarial quinine more palatable?
Gin and tonic
Gin and tonic took off after 1858, when the first commercial tonic water went on sale and the British military bought it in bulk, mixing it with lime against scurvy as well.
Q 04Which opium-derived drug did Bayer sell from 1898 as a 'non-addictive' morphine substitute and cough suppressant?
Heroin
Heroin took its trade name from the German heroisch, 'heroic', and soon showed one of the highest addiction rates of any drug despite the advertising.
Q 05Which South American arrow poison was first given to a surgical patient as a muscle relaxant in Montreal in 1942?
Curare
Curare let Harold Griffith and Enid Johnson relax a patient's muscles during an appendectomy on 23 January 1942, and its main alkaloid is still called tubocurarine after the bamboo tubes it was packed in.
Q 06Belladonna, Italian for 'beautiful woman', is widely claimed to be named for women using its drops to do what?
Dilate their pupils
Dilate their pupils was the claimed effect, and the plant's atropine, purified in the 1830s, remains one of the few deadly-nightshade compounds with accepted medical uses.
Q 07Castor-oil seeds yield which protein toxin, fired into dissident Georgi Markov's leg from a modified umbrella in 1978?
Ricin
Ricin is not oil-soluble, so little of it ends up in castor oil, which is also heated past 80 °C to denature any that remains.
Q 08Which old idea, named in Jakob Böhme's 1621 book, held that a plant's looks reveal its cure, as walnuts for the head?
Doctrine of signatures
Doctrine of signatures logic gave eyebright and lungwort their names, yet no scientific or historical evidence shows plant shapes ever helped discover a medical use.
Q 09Which plant's root, a Chinese laxative for millennia, once fetched several times the price of opium or saffron?
Rhubarb
Rhubarb's most prized grade was 'Russian rhubarb', valued for the quality-control system the Russian Empire ran on the trade, long before anyone baked the stalks into a pie.
Q 10Which coneflower, a folk medicine of Indigenous North Americans, takes its genus name from the Greek for 'hedgehog'?
Echinacea
Echinacea earned its spiny name from the bristly central disk of the flower, and archaeological evidence of its use as folk medicine reaches back to the 18th century.
Q 11Which compound, absent from intact garlic and formed only when the clove is damaged, was first isolated in 1944?
Allicin
Allicin is made by the enzyme alliinase acting on alliin the moment tissue is cut, and Chester Cavallito and John Hays Bailey were the first to study it in the laboratory.
Q 12Which yellow-flowered herb, named for a midsummer feast on 24 June, is approved in the EU for mild depressive episodes?
St John's wort
St John's wort was traditionally gathered at the Midsummer festival that the church later made St John's Feast Day, and its petals carry black dots along their edges.
Q 13The opium poppy's Latin species name, somniferum, describes which effect of the dried latex from its seed pods?
Brings sleep
Q 21William Withering's 1785 Account of the Foxglove reported clinical trials of the plant against which swelling illness?
Dropsy
Dropsy, the old name for the fluid build-up now called oedema, was allegedly first treated by a Shropshire herbalist called Mother Hutton, a story invented in 1928 by an advertising illustrator.
Q 22Charles Ledger's high-quinine cinchona seeds, collected in Bolivia in 1865, were grown by the Dutch on which island?
Java
Java got the seeds only after Ledger's Bolivian collector Manuel Incra Mamani spent four years watching frost destroy the high-quinine plants before finding a hardy specimen.
Q 23Laudanum, the opium tincture of the Romantic era, grew from the concoctions of which 16th-century Swiss alchemist?
Paracelsus
Brings sleep is the sense of somniferum, a nod to the sedative opiates in the latex that the seed pods ooze when scored.
Q 14Which opium alkaloid, isolated in France in 1832 and now the world's most used opiate, is Greek for 'poppy head'?
Codeine
Codeine was first isolated by Pierre Robiquet, and its name comes from the Ancient Greek kōdeia, the seed head of the poppy.
Q 15Which waxy aromatic solid, an Egyptian embalming ingredient and folk decongestant, comes from an East Asian laurel?
Camphor
Camphor comes from the wood of Cinnamomum camphora, and Finnish chemist Gustaf Komppa published the first total synthesis of camphoric acid, the route to synthetic camphor, in 1903.
Q 16Which herb, called soldier's woundwort in the US Civil War, has a genus name honouring Achilles' care of wounded men?
Yarrow
Yarrow was used in ancient times to stop bleeding, and in the 16th century its crushed leaves were pressed into service against nosebleeds.
Q 17Aloe vera, a skin treatment in records since the fourth millennium BCE, is thought native to which region's Hajar range?
Arabian Peninsula
Arabian Peninsula highlands in north-eastern Oman and the eastern UAE are the likeliest homeland, and the genus name comes from the Arabic alloeh, 'bitter and shiny substance'.
Q 18Ginseng's genus name Panax, shared by the American and Asian species, comes from an Ancient Greek word meaning what?
All-heal
All-heal is the meaning of the Greek pánax, while the English word ginseng comes from Teochew Chinese jîn-sim, 'person' plus a forked 'plant root'.
Q 19The '-spir-' in aspirin comes from Spiraea, the old genus of which wetland herb, an early source of salicylic acid?
Meadowsweet
Meadowsweet, then Spiraea ulmaria, gave its name to Spirsäure, the German term for salicylic acid, and Bayer added 'a' for acetyl and '-in' as a typical drug ending.
Q 20Which English chaplain's 1763 letter to the Royal Society reported powdered willow bark curing some 50 cases of ague?
Edward Stone
Edward Stone dosed his ague sufferers over five years with success in all but a few severe cases, and his letter is the earliest known mention of willow bark against fever.
Paracelsus recommended opium for reducing pain, and in the 1660s the English physician Thomas Sydenham popularised a proprietary opium tincture that he also named laudanum.
Q 24Which gout drug, first isolated in 1820 and still prescribed, is purified from the autumn crocus, or meadow saffron?
Colchicine
Colchicine's plant was recommended for rheumatism and swelling in an Egyptian papyrus of about 1500 BC, and a Colchicum extract was described for gout in a first-century AD herbal.
Q 25Reserpine, an early antipsychotic and blood-pressure drug, came in 1952 from the dried root of which Ayurvedic plant?
Indian snakeroot
Indian snakeroot, or sarpagandha, is mentioned in Hindu manuscripts as long ago as 1000 BCE, and reserpine reached the market in 1954, two years after chlorpromazine.
Q 26Which West African ordeal poison's compound physostigmine, a glaucoma drug, did Percy Julian synthesise in 1935?
Calabar bean
Calabar bean, or chopping nut, was prevalent in Efik culture as an ordeal poison, and physostigmine had already been used against glaucoma by Ludwig Laqueur in 1876.
Q 27Warfarin emerged after Karl Paul Link's Wisconsin lab traced cattle bleeding to death to spoilt hay of which plant?
Sweet clover
Sweet clover's haemorrhagic agent turned out to be dicoumarol, and the warfarin that followed was patented in 1945 and first marketed as a rat poison, its name taken from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
Q 28The cancer drugs etoposide and teniposide derive from podophyllotoxin, found in the rhizome of which American plant?
Mayapple
Mayapple rhizomes hold 0.3 to 1.0 percent podophyllotoxin by mass, and that lignan's skeleton was the starting point for both antitumour agents.
Q 29Which country's government fought a 1995 European patent on a neem fungicide until the patent office revoked it in 2005?
India
India argued that the process patented by W. R. Grace and the US Department of Agriculture had been in use there for more than 2,000 years, and the tree is native to the subcontinent yet now grown across the tropics.
Q 30Ayurveda's two surviving foundational texts are the surgical compendium of Sushruta and which work on internal medicine?
Charaka Samhita
Charaka Samhita is attributed to a physician of the 1st to 2nd century CE and was later revised by Dṛḍhabala, whose additions are still read as part of the text.