Medicine
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7correct to beat the crowd
This medicine trivia quiz has 148 free questions with answers and starts gently and then gets genuinely hard. The opening questions are the ones every medical student knows: the father of medicine, the stethoscope, the first vaccine, the discovery of penicillin and X-rays. After that it turns to the stories doctors tell each other: the surgeon who threaded a catheter into his own heart and walked to the X-ray room to prove it, the Australian who drank a flask of bacteria to settle the ulcer debate, the FDA reviewer who kept thalidomide out of America, and the railroad foreman who survived an iron rod through his skull. It suits nurses, medical students, pre-meds and anyone who wants a medical round with real teeth for a pub quiz or a break-room competition. Difficulty is marked on every question, so you can tell the warm-ups from the stumpers. Every answer has been checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source, and each question shows its citation and a short explanation once you have answered.
30 of 148 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which ancient Greek physician is widely regarded as the 'Father of Medicine'?
Hippocrates
Hippocrates, born on the island of Kos around 460 BC, probably wrote few of the sixty or so medical works that carry his name, and perhaps not even the oath doctors still associate with him.
Q 02Which part of the eye turns cloudy in a cataract?
The lens
The lens clouds over when its proteins break down and clump together, usually with age; surgeons remove it and slip a clear artificial one into its place.
Q 03Which instrument did French physician René Laennec invent in 1816, at first a simple hollow tube of wood?
Stethoscope
Stethoscope: Laennec was uneasy about pressing his ear to a young woman's chest, tried a rolled-up tube of paper instead, and found he could hear her heart more clearly than ever.
Q 04What is the outermost layer of the human skin called?
Epidermis
The epidermis has no blood supply of its own, and its surface is made of dead, keratin-filled cells that are shed all the time.
Q 05Which organ, the largest inside the body, both detoxifies your blood and makes the bile that breaks down fat?
Liver
The liver can grow back after losing a large part of itself, which is why surgeons can transplant part of a living donor's liver and the donor's remaining piece returns to almost full size.
Q 06Which imaging technique uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to picture soft tissue, with no ionising radiation?
MRI
MRI lines up the hydrogen atoms in the body's water with a powerful magnet and reads the radio signals they give off; that magnet is why every patient is asked about metal implants before going in.
Q 07Edward Jenner's pioneering vaccine, the world's first, targeted which disease?
Smallpox
Smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people over the centuries, yet it is now the only human disease ever eradicated: the World Health Organization declared the world free of it in 1980.
Q 08Which is the largest artery in the human body?
Aorta
The aorta has elastic walls that stretch as each heartbeat fills it and spring back between beats, which keeps blood flowing smoothly while the heart refills.
Q 09What does a doctor mean by hypertension?
High blood pressure
Hypertension means high blood pressure: persistently elevated pressure in the arteries, which forces the heart to work harder with every beat and damages blood vessels over time.
Q 10Which Scottish physician discovered penicillin in 1928, as a crude extract of a Penicillium mould?
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming came back from holiday to find that a stray mould had killed the bacteria on a culture plate left out on his bench; he first called the active substance 'mould juice'.
Q 11Which hormone did Banting and Best first isolate in Toronto in 1921?
Insulin
Insulin was first tried in January 1922 on a 14-year-old boy dying of diabetes; the crude first dose did little, but a purified batch soon afterwards brought his blood sugar down and revived him.
Q 12Which German physicist at Wurzburg in 1895 produced the radiation that bears his name in many languages?
Wilhelm Rontgen
Wilhelm Rontgen called his discovery X-rays because their nature was unknown; one of his first pictures showed the bones of his wife's hand, with the shadow of the ring she was wearing.
Q 13Which South African surgeon carried out the world's first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967?
Christiaan Barnard
Q 21Which German bacteriologist identified the agents of TB, cholera and anthrax and set four postulates?
Robert Koch
Robert Koch announced the tuberculosis bacillus on 24 March 1882, the date now marked each year as World TB Day; his four postulates set the conditions a microbe must meet before it can be blamed for a disease.
Q 22Whose 1543 De humani corporis fabrica earned him the title of founder of modern anatomy?
Andreas Vesalius
Andreas Vesalius was 28 when the Fabrica appeared in Basel in 1543; its woodcuts, probably drawn in Titian's studio, showed what he had found by dissecting human bodies, where Galen had relied on animals.
Q 23Paul Ehrlich's Salvarsan (1910) was the first effective medicinal treatment for which disease?
Christiaan Barnard operated at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town; his patient, Louis Washkansky, came through the surgery but died of pneumonia 18 days later, his defences knocked out by the drugs given to stop rejection.
Q 14What had Karl Landsteiner found in 1901 when he noticed samples from two people clump together on contact?
The blood groups
The blood groups explained why transfusions had so often ended in disaster: mixing incompatible types makes the red cells clump, so matching donor to patient at last made the procedure safe.
Q 15Which Hungarian physician cut maternal deaths in Vienna in 1847 by making doctors wash their hands?
Ignaz Semmelweis
Ignaz Semmelweis saw that the ward run by medical students, who came straight from the dissecting room, lost far more mothers than the midwives' ward, so he made them wash in chlorinated lime; he died in an asylum in 1865.
Q 16Whose 1628 treatise De Motu Cordis first described in full how the heart pumps blood around the body?
William Harvey
William Harvey, physician to James I and Charles I, showed that the heart pumps blood in a continuous circuit. He could not see the capillaries linking arteries to veins; Marcello Malpighi found them with a microscope in 1661.
Q 17Who was the first human given Louis Pasteur's rabies vaccine, on 6 July 1885?
A 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister
A 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister had been badly bitten by a rabid dog; Pasteur, who was not a doctor, treated him with some reluctance, and the boy's survival helped bring in the donations that built the Pasteur Institute.
Q 18Which substance did Joseph Lister introduce in the 1860s to sterilise instruments, wounds and hands?
Carbolic acid
Carbolic acid, now called phenol, was already being used to stop sewage smelling, which gave Lister the idea of trying it on wounds; Listerine mouthwash was later named in his honour.
Q 19Which anaesthetic did Boston dentist William Morton demonstrate to an audience of surgeons in 1846?
Ether
Ether kept a patient still while a surgeon cut a tumour from his neck, in the same Boston theatre where another dentist's laughing-gas demonstration had failed; the room is now known as the Ether Dome.
Q 20What did Barry Marshall do in 1984 to back his claim that a bacterium causes stomach ulcers?
Drank a culture of it
Drank a culture of it: hoping to persuade sceptics, Marshall swallowed a broth of Helicobacter pylori, went down with gastritis within days and then took antibiotics; a Nobel Prize followed in 2005.
Syphilis
Salvarsan, an arsenic compound, was the first effective drug against syphilis; it was number 606 in Ehrlich's screening programme, hence its early nickname. Ehrlich called a drug that kills only its target a Zauberkugel, or magic bullet.
Q 24What passed through railroad foreman Phineas Gage's skull in an 1848 accident in Cavendish, Vermont?
A metre-long tamping iron
A metre-long tamping iron, the rod he used to pack blasting powder, shot in below his left cheekbone and out through the top of his skull; Gage was awake and talking straight afterwards and lived for more than eleven years.
Q 25Virginia Apgar's 1952 score checks the health of which patients?
Newborn babies
Newborn babies are scored 0 to 2 on each of five signs, one and five minutes after birth; years later the signs were renamed to spell out her surname: appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, respiration.
Q 26The Glasgow scale of 1974 rates eyes, speech and movement to grade what?
Level of consciousness
Level of consciousness is scored from 3 to 15 on the Glasgow Coma Scale; each of the three responses scores at least 1, so even a patient who does nothing at all gets 3, not 0.
Q 27In which country was the last natural case of smallpox recorded, in 1977?
Somalia
Somalia's Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital worker in the port of Merca, caught it in October 1977, recovered, and later spent years working as a vaccinator himself; a laboratory accident in England caused one last death in 1978.
Q 28The Rh factor in blood typing takes its name from which animal used in the original experiments?
A monkey
A monkey, the rhesus macaque, supplied the blood used in the first tests for the factor, hence 'Rh'; it matters most in pregnancy, when an Rh-negative mother can make antibodies against her Rh-positive baby's blood.
Q 29Broca's area, linked to speech production, sits in which lobe of the brain, usually in the left hemisphere?
Frontal
Paul Broca located the region in the left frontal lobe in 1861 through patient Louis Victor Leborgne, known as 'Tan' because that syllable was all he could say. Leborgne's brain was preserved in a Paris museum.
Q 30FDA reviewer Frances Kelsey was honoured by JFK in 1962 for refusing to approve which drug?
Thalidomide
Kelsey withheld approval of thalidomide, pressing its US licensee for safety data it could not supply, so America was largely spared the birth-defect tragedy seen in Europe; JFK gave her the President's Award in August 1962.