Surgery
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50 free Surgery trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Surgery is one of the oldest branches of medicine and, for most of its history, one of the most frightening. Before pain relief and clean technique, speed was a surgeon's greatest skill. The story of how operations became safe, routine and sometimes astonishing is full of accidents, rivalries and stubborn pioneers. This quiz covers that whole story: ancient healers and battlefield medics, the breakthroughs that tamed pain and infection, the tools of the operating room, the meaning of common surgical terms, transplants and implants, and well-known patients from royalty to professional athletes. A few questions come from games, comics and detective fiction too. It is written for curious general readers as much as for medical and nursing students, and it works well for a hospital social, a classroom warm-up or a trivia night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn the story behind each fact as you play.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which organ did Soviet doctor Leonid Rogozov cut out of his own body at an Antarctic base in 1961?
Appendix
The appendix had to come out, and Rogozov was the only doctor on a base more than 1,600 km from the nearest Soviet station. A driver and a meteorologist passed him instruments and held a mirror.
Q 02Which animals' intestines usually supplied the catgut that long stitched wounds and strung violins?
Sheep
Sheep and goats were the usual source, and catgut has never been documented as coming from a cat. The name may be a muddle of an old dialect word for a fiddle.
Q 03Which medieval tradesmen also pulled teeth and amputated limbs, sharing a London guild with surgeons from 1540?
Barbers
Barbers already owned razors and had the dexterity, so they did the cutting at a time when physicians rarely operated. Their striped pole once advertised those extra services.
Q 04Which Renaissance artist gives his name to the robotic surgical system cleared for US use in 2000?
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci was chosen partly because his studies of anatomy led him to design a mechanical knight, an early robot. The surgeon sits at a console and steers the machine's arms from there.
Q 05In which country did Christiaan Barnard perform the first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967?
South Africa
South Africa made world headlines when Barnard gave Louis Washkansky the heart of a young crash victim at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. Washkansky lived for another 18 days.
Q 06Which operating room item did William Halsted have Goodyear make in 1889 for his scrub nurse?
Rubber gloves
Rubber gloves were made to spare scrub nurse Caroline Hampton, whose skin reacted badly to the antiseptics. She later married Halsted, and the idea turned out to make operations far cleaner too.
Q 07Which British monarch inhaled chloroform from Dr. John Snow during the birth of her eighth child?
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria took the drug for the birth of Prince Leopold and asked for it again four years later for Princess Beatrice. Snow is better known for tracing a London cholera outbreak to a water pump.
Q 08Which creatures do surgeons still place on reattached fingers to drain pooled blood?
Leeches
Leeches returned to hospitals in the 1970s with microsurgery, because they relieve blood pooling in reattached fingers and ears. US regulators classed them as a medical device in 2004.
Q 09Which fictional detective was modeled on Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Bell, who read patients at a glance?
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes owes his methods to Bell, whom Arthur Conan Doyle served as an outpatient clerk in 1877. Doyle later wrote to tell his old teacher so.
Q 10Which color did operating room staff wear before hospitals switched to green to ease eye strain?
White
White was chosen to emphasize cleanliness, but under bright operating lights an all-white room tired the eyes. Green cut the glare and made splashes of blood less conspicuous.
Q 11Which vapor did dentist William Morton use in Boston in 1846 to show the public painless surgery?
Ether
Ether kept Edward Abbott still while surgeon John Collins Warren cut part of a tumor from his neck. The operating hall at Massachusetts General Hospital has been known as the Ether Dome ever since.
Q 12Which British surgeon, honored in a mouthwash's name, pioneered germ-killing carbolic acid in the 1860s?
Joseph Lister
Joseph Lister read Louis Pasteur's work on microbes and reasoned that germs were rotting his patients' wounds. Listerine was named after him in 1879.
Q 13Which organ did surgeon Joseph Murray transplant between identical twin brothers in Boston in 1954?
Kidney
Q 21Which transparent part of the eye is reshaped with a laser in LASIK surgery to sharpen vision?
Cornea
The cornea is first cut to make a thin flap, then an excimer laser reshapes the tissue underneath before the flap is laid back in place.
Q 22Which eye condition was treated for centuries by couching, pushing the lens aside with a needle?
Cataracts
Cataracts cloud the lens, so couching simply knocked it out of the line of sight. It is the earliest documented form of the operation, though it left the eye with no lens to focus through.
Q 23Which device did surgeon Åke Senning implant in Swedish patient Arne Larsson in 1958, a world first?
Pacemaker
A kidney from Ronald Herrick saved his dying twin Richard in the first successful human organ transplant. Using identical twins sidestepped the immune rejection that many thought could never be beaten.
Q 14Which part of the body is drilled or scraped open in trepanation, one of the oldest known operations?
Skull
The skull was opened with hand tools of stone, obsidian or bronze. New bone growing around the hole in some Neolithic remains shows that the patient survived.
Q 15Which Roman statesman is popularly but probably wrongly said to have given his name to surgical childbirth?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar is an unlikely source, because the operation killed mothers in ancient Rome and his mother Aurelia lived for decades after his birth. The term may come instead from a Latin verb meaning to cut.
Q 16Which facial feature did the ancient Indian surgeon Sushruta describe rebuilding with a flap of cheek skin?
Nose
The nose repair in Sushruta's Sanskrit treatise is the first written record of a cheek-flap technique that surgeons still use. The same text describes amputations and eye operations.
Q 17Which ancient civilization produced the oldest known surgical text on injuries, covering 48 cases?
Egypt
Egypt's Edwin Smith Papyrus, copied around 1600 BCE, handles wounds, fractures and dislocations with observation instead of magic. It may have been a manual for army medics.
Q 18Which French ruler's surgeon, Dominique Jean Larrey, invented horse-drawn flying ambulances for the wounded?
Napoleon
Napoleon asked for Larrey as chief surgeon of his army in Italy after meeting him at Toulon. Larrey borrowed the idea from the fast carriages of the horse artillery.
Q 19Which British admiral lost most of his right arm to a ship's surgeon after a 1797 attack on Tenerife?
Horatio Nelson
Horatio Nelson was hit by a musket ball as he stepped ashore, and surgeon Thomas Eshelby took the limb off aboard HMS Theseus. Within half an hour he was giving orders to his captains again.
Q 20Which organ can a living donor give a piece of, because what remains grows back to full size?
Liver
The liver is the only internal organ able to regenerate, and as little as a tenth of it can regrow to full size. That lets surgeons share one organ between a donor and a patient.
The pacemaker bought Larsson another 43 years, during which he went through 26 of the devices. He died in 2001 at the age of 86.
Q 24Which joint did English surgeon John Charnley learn to replace reliably at Wrightington Hospital in 1962?
Hip
The hip he designed paired a stainless steel ball with a plastic socket, both fixed in place with acrylic bone cement. His first sockets were made of Teflon and wore out within a year or two.
Q 25Which drug became the first local anesthetic when Karl Koller numbed eyes with it in Vienna in 1884?
Cocaine
Cocaine had been studied by Koller's hospital colleague Sigmund Freud, who knew it dulled pain but missed its power to numb tissue. Dentists soon took it up as well.
Q 26Which pitcher gives his name to the elbow ligament operation that Dodgers doctor Frank Jobe devised in 1974?
Tommy John
Tommy John was given a one in 100 chance of success, then won 164 games after the operation, more than the 124 he had won before it. He retired at 46.
Q 27Which US president had a mouth tumor removed in secret aboard a friend's yacht in 1893?
Grover Cleveland
Grover Cleveland feared that news of his illness would deepen a financial panic. Surgeons worked through his mouth as the yacht Oneida sailed off Long Island, so that no scar would show.
Q 28Which US president died after doctors spent weeks probing his bullet wound with unsterilized fingers?
James Garfield
James Garfield survived the 1881 shooting for eleven weeks before infection killed him. Alexander Graham Bell even built a metal detector to hunt for the bullet.
Q 29Which brain operation earned Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz a Nobel Prize in 1949?
Lobotomy
Lobotomy, which Moniz called leucotomy, cut nerve connections in the frontal lobe because he believed faulty wiring there caused mental illness. He was the first Portuguese Nobel laureate.
Q 30Which Hungarian doctor slashed deaths in a Vienna maternity ward in 1847 by making staff wash their hands?
Ignaz Semmelweis
Ignaz Semmelweis cut the death rate from 18% to under 2% with a chlorinated lime wash, though he could not explain why it worked. He died in an asylum in 1865.