Morphine
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40 free Morphine trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Morphine is one of the oldest drugs still in daily hospital use, and its story runs well beyond the pharmacy. It was the first painkiller to be purified from a plant, it changed how wounded soldiers were treated, and it has turned up in detective fiction, stage drama and the biographies of some very unexpected people. This quiz mixes the science with the stories. Expect questions on where the drug comes from and how it got its name, how it acts on the brain and the gut, what makes an overdose dangerous and how one is reversed, and the laws, conflicts and inventions that shaped its use. It is written for curious players rather than pharmacists. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the fun facts stick whether you are revising for a nursing exam, setting a pub quiz round or simply wondering what a bagel has to do with a drug test.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Eating which bagel topping, harvested from the plant that yields morphine, can cause a failed drug test?
Poppy seeds
Poppy seeds can carry traces of opium from the pod, enough to register as opiates in a urine test. US federal testing raised its cut-off level in 1998 partly to stop bagels failing people.
Q 02Morphine's discoverer named the drug after Morpheus, the Greek god of what?
Dreams
Dreams were the realm of Morpheus, who in Ovid's Metamorphoses enters them in the shape of mortal men. The drug was first called morphium before the modern spelling took over.
Q 03Which drug did Bayer sell from 1898 as a cough remedy and supposedly safer substitute for morphine?
Heroin
Heroin is morphine with two acetyl groups added, and its trade name is said to come from the German word for heroic. An English chemist had first made it in 1874.
Q 04Which fictional Victorian detective sometimes uses morphine and injects cocaine in a seven-percent solution?
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes reaches for both drugs mostly when he has no stimulating case to work on, to Dr Watson's dismay. Both were legal in 19th-century England.
Q 05Which natural painkillers made in the brain have a name that is short for 'endogenous morphine'?
Endorphins
Endorphins are peptides that block the perception of pain and lift the mood, and the brain releases them during hard exercise. Endogenous simply means made within.
Q 06Which emergency drug, sold as the nasal spray Narcan, can reverse a morphine overdose within minutes?
Naloxone
Naloxone blocks the receptors that opioids act on, and it works within about two minutes when given into a vein. It wears off faster than some opioids, so repeat doses may be needed.
Q 07Which Nazi leader became addicted to morphine after being wounded in Hitler's failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch?
Hermann Göring
Hermann Göring was given the drug after surgery in Innsbruck, and the habit lasted until his imprisonment at Nuremberg. In 1925 he was placed in an asylum as a dangerous addict.
Q 08Which synthetic opioid, often worn as a skin patch, is rated 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine?
Fentanyl
Fentanyl was first made by Paul Janssen in 1960 and approved for US medical use in 1968. Morphine remains the yardstick against which the strength of such drugs is measured.
Q 09Heavy use of morphine in which war is said to have left veterans with the so-called 'soldier's disease'?
American Civil War
American Civil War use of the drug was extensive, but historians dispute how many veterans it hooked. The phrase 'soldier's disease' is first documented only in 1915.
Q 10Which milder painkiller, also found in raw opium, works largely by turning into morphine once swallowed?
Codeine
Codeine is a prodrug, turned into morphine by an enzyme called CYP2D6. People with extra working copies of the gene convert it so fast that normal doses can be dangerous.
Q 11Which common side effect of morphine comes from the drug's action on nerves in the wall of the intestine?
Constipation
Constipation follows because the drug slows the muscle contractions that push food through the gut. The anti-diarrhoea remedy loperamide works by the very same action.
Q 12Which change in the eyes is one of the three classic signs doctors look for in a morphine overdose?
Pinpoint pupils
Pinpoint pupils, known medically as miosis, are caused by nearly every opioid, with pethidine a notable exception. Withdrawal does the opposite and widens them.
Q 13A large overdose of morphine kills mainly by shutting down which vital function?
Breathing
Q 21Morphine's discoverer reported in 1817 that he had nearly died after dosing himself and which other people?
Three young boys
Three young boys swallowed the drug alongside him, and all four people almost died. He then had the group drink vinegar to purge the dose.
Q 22French doctor Edme Castaing is thought to be the first person, in the 1820s, to use morphine for which crime?
Murder
Murder was the jury's verdict, by seven votes to five, over the death of his wealthy friend Auguste Ballet. Doctors at the trial disagreed about which poison had been used.
Q 23Vets give apomorphine, a compound first made by boiling morphine in acid, to make dogs do what?
Vomit
Breathing turns slow and shallow until the blood runs short of oxygen, a state doctors call respiratory depression. Immediate medical attention can prevent death.
Q 14Which bitter, reddish-brown tincture of opium in alcohol was a common Victorian remedy containing morphine?
Laudanum
Laudanum holds about 10% powdered opium by weight, the equivalent of roughly 1% morphine. Doctors can still prescribe it as opium tincture, mainly for stubborn diarrhoea.
Q 15Morphine use spread widely after which 1850s invention credited to the Scottish doctor Alexander Wood?
Hypodermic syringe
Hypodermic syringe injections put the drug straight under the skin rather than through the gut. Wood's 1853 design joined a hollow needle to a true syringe.
Q 16Which organ breaks down much of a swallowed dose of morphine before it can reach the rest of the body?
Liver
Liver enzymes intercept the drug on its way from the gut, an effect called first-pass metabolism. About 87% of a dose then leaves in the urine within three days.
Q 17Morphine is on which organisation's List of Essential Medicines, a guide to the drugs countries need most?
World Health Organization
World Health Organization experts rate it an essential painkiller, yet most medical use of the drug still happens in the developed world.
Q 18Which Hungarian-born horror star became addicted to morphine prescribed for sciatic pain?
Bela Lugosi
Bela Lugosi, the screen's 1931 Dracula, sought treatment in 1955, and the premiere of one of his last films was arranged to help pay his hospital bills.
Q 19What is the medical term for needing ever larger doses of morphine to get the same relief after repeated use?
Tolerance
Tolerance builds faster for pain relief than for some of the drug's dangers, so chasing the same relief with bigger doses raises the risk of an overdose.
Q 20Which German pharmacist, then in his early twenties, first isolated morphine from opium in Paderborn?
Friedrich Sertürner
Friedrich Sertürner publicly warned of the terrible effects of the substance he had found. His work is regarded as the first isolation of a medicinal plant's active drug.
Vomit is the aim when a dog has just swallowed something toxic or foreign. Despite the name, the drug contains no morphine and does not act on opioid receptors.
Q 24Which Australian state grows roughly half the world's legal supply of the plant that morphine comes from?
Tasmania
Tasmania's growers harvest the dried pods and stalks, known as straw, and factories pull the drug out with solvents. No sticky raw opium is collected there.
Q 25Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, a morphine remedy first sold in 1845, was aimed mainly at which childhood ordeal?
Teething
Teething infants were quieted with a formula holding 65 mg of morphine per fluid ounce. In 1911 the American Medical Association listed it in a section called Baby Killers.
Q 26What were the single-dose squeeze-tube morphine injectors in World War II first aid kits called?
Syrette
Syrette was the name of a sealed tube with a needle attached, developed by the drug maker Squibb just before the war. A wire loop broke the seal before the needle went in.
Q 27Where did World War II medics often pin a used morphine tube to show others a dose had been given?
On the collar
On the collar was the usual spot, where the next medic or surgeon would see how much the wounded soldier had already received.
Q 28Which Asian country still gathers legal opium for morphine mainly by the old method of scoring the pods?
India
India licenses farmers to gather the raw latex, which government centres dry to a uniform level and sell to drug makers. Most other legal producers process the dried plant instead.
Q 29Scientists confirmed in the early 2000s that traces of morphine are made naturally in which unexpected place?
The human body
The human body makes tiny amounts of the drug itself, a finding that ended some thirty years of speculation about a receptor that seemed to respond only to morphine.
Q 30Papaver somniferum, the plant that morphine comes from, has a Latin species name with which meaning?
Sleep-bringing
Sleep-bringing is the sense Carl Linnaeus chose when he named the species in 1753. The same Latin root, somnus, gives English the words insomnia and somnolent.