Nursing Trivia
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6correct to beat the crowd
This nursing trivia quiz has 117 free questions with answers and covers the whole profession: the Crimean War hospital at Scutari, the school Florence Nightingale opened at St Thomas' in 1860, Mary Seacole's British Hotel, Clara Barton on the battlefield, and the first professionally trained nurses in the United States. There are rounds on the theorists every nursing student meets (Henderson, Peplau, Orem, Watson, Leininger, Benner), on the Army, Navy and Cadet Nurse Corps, and on the tools of the trade, from Laennec's rolled-up paper tube to the Riva-Rocci cuff. Lighter questions cover nurses on screen (Nurse Jackie, Nurse Ratched, Call the Midwife, Margaret Houlihan), the history of the cap and the pin, Nightingale's pet owl, and why Nurses Week always ends on May 12. It suits a Nurses Week party, a unit break-room challenge, a nursing school icebreaker or a solo test of your history-of-medicine knowledge. Every answer has been checked against a primary source such as Wikipedia, the American Nurses Association or Gallup, and each question shows exactly where it came from.
30 of 117 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which newspaper reported that Nightingale made her night rounds at Scutari 'with a little lamp in her hand'?
The Times
The Times printed that picture of her rounds, and Longfellow's 1857 poem 'Santa Filomena', with its line 'A Lady with a lamp shall stand', spread it further.
Q 02Nightingale's Scutari hospital, reached in 1854, lies in which modern city?
Istanbul
Scutari is now part of Istanbul, and its hospital's death rate only began to fall after a sanitary commission sent in spring 1855 repaired sewers and ventilation.
Q 03Nightingale's 1859 'Notes on Nursing' offered 'hints for thought' chiefly to which readers?
Ordinary women
Ordinary women were her audience: the preface says almost every woman has charge of somebody's health, 'in other words, every woman is a nurse'.
Q 04Before the Crimean War, Nightingale trained as a nurse at a Lutheran deaconess institute in which country?
Germany
Germany's Kaiserswerth institute trained her despite her family's disapproval, since they saw nursing as lowly work unsuitable for a woman of her standing.
Q 05What did Florence Nightingale call her printed compilation of charts on Crimean army deaths?
A coxcomb
A coxcomb was her word for the eye-catching booklet of charts she had printed, the showy part of a huge report that people would actually notice.
Q 06Florence Nightingale became the first woman elected to which learned body?
The Royal Statistical Society
The Royal Statistical Society admitted a pioneer whose statistics and diagrams gave hard evidence to a Royal Commission on the army's health.
Q 07What did Nightingale name the juvenile owl she rescued in Greece and kept as a pet?
Athena
Athena was the name she gave the little owl after saving it from a group of children who were tormenting it, and it came home with her as a pet.
Q 08In 1907 Nightingale became the first woman to receive which British honour?
The Order of Merit
The Order of Merit came decades after the Crimea; though intermittently bedridden from 1857, she had kept campaigning to raise health standards.
Q 09In which US city was the Nightingale Pledge written in 1893 by Lystra Gretter and a committee?
Detroit
Detroit's Farrand Training School produced it, and new American nurses often recite the pledge at their pinning ceremonies.
Q 10Which Jamaican-born nurse opened the 'British Hotel' near Balaclava for sick and convalescent Crimean War officers?
Mary Seacole
Mary Seacole came home from the war destitute, and in July 1857 a benefit festival was staged to raise money for her.
Q 11Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, was born on which holiday in 1821?
Christmas Day
Christmas Day 1821 was her birthday, and after the war her office helped trace more than 20,000 missing soldiers.
Q 12At which 1862 battle did Clara Barton see wounds dressed with corn husks because army supplies lagged far behind?
Antietam
Antietam was one of several battles where she nursed under fire, and in one such moment a bullet tore through her sleeve and killed the man she was helping.
Q 13Before and after running Union army nurses, Dorothea Dix crusaded for better care of whom?
The mentally ill
Q 21Madeleine Leininger developed which concept, arguing that care must fit a patient's values, beliefs and 'lifeways'?
Transcultural nursing
Transcultural nursing has since grown into a discipline of its own, teaching nurses to weigh a patient's cultural background when planning care.
Q 22Patricia Benner's 1984 book 'From Novice to Expert' applied whose skill-acquisition framework to nursing?
The Dreyfus model
The Dreyfus model gave her five stages from novice to expert, and she argued that expert nurses act on an intuitive grasp of situations rather than rules.
Q 23American nurse Clara Maass died in 1901 after volunteering to be bitten by mosquitoes carrying which disease?
Yellow fever
The mentally ill were her lifelong cause, and as superintendent she insisted that Union and Confederate wounded be treated alike.
Q 14Which American poet worked part-time in the army paymaster's office while volunteering as a nurse in Civil War hospitals?
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman turned those years into the poems of 'Drum-Taps', and after Lincoln's assassination he wrote the elegy 'O Captain! My Captain!'
Q 15Linda Richards, America's first trained nurse, is credited with creating what at New York's Bellevue Hospital?
Individual patient records
Individual patient records were her Bellevue innovation, and she later went to Japan to set up nurse training there.
Q 16Who became the first African American professionally trained nurse in the United States, in 1879?
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mary Eliza Mahoney, a longtime supporter of women's suffrage, is believed to be among the first women in Boston to sign up to vote in 1920.
Q 17Nurse Lillian Wald founded which institution on New York's Lower East Side in 1893?
Henry Street Settlement
Henry Street Settlement nurse Lina Rogers and Wald set up the first school nurse program in the United States, sending nurses into New York's classrooms.
Q 18Which nursing theorist defined the nurse's unique function as assisting the individual 'sick or well'?
Virginia Henderson
Virginia Henderson's definition aims at independence: nurses help people do what they would do unaided, so they can look after themselves once they leave hospital.
Q 19Nursing theorist Hildegard Peplau is known for a middle-range theory of what?
Interpersonal relations
Interpersonal relations theory carried psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan's ideas into nursing and helped nurses develop more therapeutic ways of working with patients.
Q 20Dickens's drunken nurse Sairey Gamp, who always carried one, gave British slang a word for what?
An umbrella
An umbrella became a 'gamp', and Dickens's caricature became the stock image of the untrained nurse before Victorian nursing reform.
Yellow fever killed her at 25, and the public outcry over her death ended the yellow fever experiments on human volunteers in Cuba.
Q 24Which US president issued the 1974 proclamation designating a National Nurse Week?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon's week ran from 10 to 16 February 1974, but National Nurses Week now runs each May, ending on Nightingale's birthday.
Q 25Which city is home to the International Council of Nurses, which chose 12 May for International Nurses Day?
Geneva
Geneva is the ICN's home, and in January 1974 the council picked 12 May for the day because it is Florence Nightingale's birthday.
Q 26The ANA traces its origins to 1896. Under what name was it first organised?
The Nurses Associated Alumnae
Plans were drawn up at the Manhattan Beach Hotel near New York City; the body took the name American Nurses Association in 1911 and is now based in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Q 27Mary Breckinridge's Frontier Nursing Service, founded in 1925, sent nurse-midwives on horseback into which state's mountains?
Kentucky
Kentucky's isolated eastern mountains were its territory, and its nurse-midwives improved health outcomes for some of America's poorest families.
Q 28Which profession topped Gallup's 2001 honesty poll, the only non-nurse winner 1999-2025?
Firefighters
The exception came in the poll taken after the 9/11 attacks; in the December 2025 survey 75% of Americans rated nurses' ethics 'very high' or 'high'.
Q 29Which nurse led the 1931 founding of America's national association of nurse anesthetists?
Agatha Hodgins
Agatha Hodgins's association went on to create national certification for nurse anesthetists and to accredit their schools.
Q 30Which agency supervised the US Cadet Nurse Corps, created in 1943 to ease the wartime nursing shortage?
The Public Health Service
The law creating it specifically banned discrimination based on race, colour or creed, and registered nurse Lucile Petry was appointed to run the programme.