Pharmacy Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
99 free Pharmacy trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
44 free pharmacy trivia questions with answers. These pharmacy trivia questions cover the profession from its beginnings to the modern chain drugstore. There is history: the first pharmacies in Baghdad, Frederick II's decree splitting doctors from apothecaries, the oldest surviving pharmacies in Tallinn and Florence, Dioscorides, the Ebers Papyrus, the show globe and where the Rx symbol comes from. Then the drugs: willow bark and aspirin, Fleming's mould and the 1945 Nobel, Banting and Best, morphine and Morpheus, quinine and gin, foxglove, ibuprofen invented at Boots, thalidomide and Frances Kelsey, the Tylenol murders, the Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy that built the FDA, placebo Latin, generics, compounding, statins, warfarin and Viagra's accidental discovery. And the soda-fountain sideline: Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Dr Pepper were all invented by pharmacists. Good for pharmacy students, a pharmacy-week quiz or a general science round. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic source and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The first recorded pharmacies opened in the 8th century in which Islamic Golden Age city?
Baghdad
Baghdad. Many histories date its first pharmacies to 754, but the city was only founded in 762.
Q 02Which emperor's decree, issued around 1240, formally separated the professions of physician and apothecary?
Frederick II
Frederick II. The Holy Roman Emperor's edict barred physicians from selling their own drugs and put both professions under official regulation.
Q 03Which city's Town Hall Pharmacy has traded from the same building since at least 1422?
Tallinn
Tallinn. The Raeapteek has long sold more than remedies: marzipan and claret wine go over the same counter as the medicines.
Q 04The pharmacy often called the world's oldest, begun by Dominican friars at Santa Maria Novella, is in which city?
Florence
Florence. Its oldest scent, Acqua della Regina, is traditionally dated to 1533, made for Catherine de' Medici to carry to France as a bride.
Q 05Which Greek physician wrote the five-volume De Materia Medica, describing some 600 medicinal plants?
Dioscorides
Dioscorides. Travelling as a surgeon with Nero's armies let him study plants across the Roman world, and his book stayed the leading drug text for more than 1,500 years.
Q 06The Ebers Papyrus, ancient Egypt's great scroll of remedies, is named after whom?
Its German buyer
Its German buyer. Georg Ebers, an Egyptologist who also wrote popular novels, purchased the scroll at Thebes in the 1870s and took it home to Leipzig.
Q 07The prescription symbol Rx comes from the Latin word 'recipe', meaning what?
Take
Medieval prescriptions began with the physician telling the apothecary to 'take' certain materials and compound them.
Q 08A show globe, the coloured-liquid glass vessel once displayed by druggists, served much the same purpose as what?
A barber's pole
A barber's pole. Both signs guided customers who could not read; one story says London apothecaries set coloured globes in their windows in the 1665 plague to show they had stayed when doctors fled.
Q 09Which Romantic poet qualified as an apothecary in 1816 but gave up medicine to write verse?
John Keats
John Keats. He trained under a surgeon and assisted at operations at Guy's Hospital, yet never practised: within months of qualifying he told his guardian he would be a poet.
Q 10Aspirin's precursor, salicin, comes from the bark of which tree?
Willow
Willow. In 1763 the English clergyman Edward Stone ran one of the first clinical trials, treating fever patients with powdered willow bark.
Q 11Which German company first produced pure acetylsalicylic acid in 1897 and named it Aspirin?
Bayer
Bayer. In World War I the United States seized the firm's American arm and auctioned it off, trademarks included, and Bayer had to buy its own name back decades later.
Q 12Doctors avoid giving aspirin to children with viral infections because of the risk of which condition?
Reye syndrome
Reye syndrome. The rare illness attacks the brain and liver; after doctors stopped giving children aspirin in the 1980s, cases fell by more than 90%.
Q 13Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by which Scottish physician?
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming. Back from a summer holiday, he found mould growing on a dish of bacteria he had left out, with a clear ring around it where the germs had died.
Q 21Paracetamol is known in the United States by which name?
Acetaminophen
Acetaminophen. Both names are stitched from syllables of the drug's long chemical name, para-acetylaminophenol; Britain and America simply kept different ones.
Q 22The 1982 Tylenol murders, in which capsules were laced with cyanide, led directly to what?
Tamper-evident packaging
Tamper-evident packaging. Tylenol's maker recalled some 31 million bottles and relaunched with foil seals, and in 1983 Congress made tampering with products a federal crime.
Q 23Thalidomide, already on sale in dozens of countries, was kept off the US market by which FDA reviewer?
Frances Oldham Kelsey
Q 14The mould strain that made wartime mass production of penicillin possible was found on which fruit at a Peoria market?
A cantaloupe
A cantaloupe. Its mould far out-produced the original 1928 strain and became the parent of every strain used commercially; who carried the melon in was never settled.
Q 15Insulin was first isolated in 1921 by Banting and Best in the Toronto laboratory of which professor?
John Macleod
John Macleod. On learning he had to share the 1923 Nobel Prize with Macleod, Banting gave half his money to Best, and Macleod then gave half of his to Collip.
Q 16For how much did insulin's discoverers sell their patent to the University of Toronto in 1923?
$1
$1. The team thought patenting a medicine unethical, so they took one out only to stop anyone else monopolising insulin, then handed it over for a token dollar.
Q 17Which painkiller did Friedrich Sertürner isolate from opium and name after the god of dreams?
Morphine
Morphine. The German pharmacist chose the name for its power to bring on sleep, calling his new crystals morphium after Morpheus.
Q 18Quinine, the malaria drug, was first isolated in 1820 from the bark of which tree?
Cinchona
Cinchona. By tradition, British officials in the tropics made their bitter quinine palatable with sugar, soda and a measure of gin, and the gin and tonic was born.
Q 19William Withering's 1785 study of a folk cure for dropsy brought which plant into medicine as a heart drug?
Foxglove
Foxglove. The cure was a Shropshire woman's secret herbal recipe; Withering picked out its one active plant and recorded how easily a dose could turn toxic.
Q 20Ibuprofen was discovered in 1961 by Stewart Adams and John Nicholson while working for which British pharmacy chain?
Boots
Boots. Adams had joined the chain as a teenage shop apprentice, and he tried the new drug on his own hangover before giving an important speech.
Frances Oldham Kelsey. Handed the file as one of her first assignments, she refused approval for over a year despite constant pressure from the maker, and President Kennedy decorated her.
Q 24Thalidomide won US approval in 2006 as a treatment for which cancer?
Multiple myeloma
Multiple myeloma. The drug that harmed more than 10,000 babies came back under strict rules, with patients checked to make sure they are not pregnant while taking it.
Q 25Which 1937 tragedy, caused by a medicine made with a toxic solvent, prompted the US Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act?
The Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster
The Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster. More than 100 people died, many of them children, yet the maker had skipped no required safety test, because the law then demanded none.
Q 26Which US president signed the Pure Food and Drug Act, the 'Wiley Act', in 1906?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt. The final push came from Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, whose nauseating picture of the meat-packing industry also forced through a meat inspection law.
Q 27The word 'placebo' is Latin for what?
I shall please
I shall please. Doctors first used the word for a remedy 'given more to please than to benefit the patient', long before anyone spoke of a placebo effect.
Q 28A generic drug may go on sale once what happens to a brand-name medicine?
Its patents expire
Its patents expire. Copies need not repeat the animal and human trials the original went through, and several rivals often arrive together, which is why generics sell for so much less.
Q 29Compounding pharmacies exist to do what?
Prepare custom medications for individuals
Prepare custom medications for individuals. A child who can't swallow a tablet may get the same drug as a liquid, and an allergic patient a version made without the offending dye.
Q 30Coca-Cola was first sold on 8 May 1886 at Jacobs' Pharmacy in which city, for five cents a glass?
Atlanta
Atlanta. Pharmacist John Pemberton carried a jug of his syrup down the street to the soda fountain; his bookkeeper chose the name, thinking 'the two Cs would look well in advertising'.