Surgical Instruments
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
40 free Surgical Instruments trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every operation depends on a tray of tools, and most of them have a story. Some carry the names of the surgeons who designed them, some are named for animals, and a few began life far from the operating room. This quiz covers the instruments that students and theatre staff meet first: the tools for cutting, clamping, grasping and holding a wound open, along with the equipment that keeps them clean. It also looks back at where they came from, from ancient kits to the inventions of the last hundred years. It is written for surgical technology and nursing students who want a quick self-test, and for anyone curious about what lies on the table beside the surgeon. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the reason behind each name as you play.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which power tool began as a 1780s Scottish surgical saw for widening the pelvis in childbirth?
Chainsaw
The chainsaw began as a fine serrated chain held between two wooden handles. A German doctor's bone-cutting version of 1830 was in effect a miniature chainsaw.
Q 02Which Founding Father designed a flexible catheter in 1752 for a brother with bladder stones?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin built the tube from hinged metal segments so that it would bend. He credited an earlier inventor, Francesco Roncelli-Pardino, with having the idea back in 1720.
Q 03Which wounded US president did Alexander Graham Bell scan for a bullet with an early metal detector?
James Garfield
James Garfield lay on a bed with metal coil springs, which confused Bell's induction balance. The search of July 1881 failed and the bullet stayed hidden.
Q 04Which execution device names the instrument that was standard for removing tonsils for eighty years?
Guillotine
The guillotine for tonsils was adapted in 1828 by physician Philip Syng Physick from a tool built to remove the uvula. It was later renamed the tonsillotome.
Q 05Which Stone Age tool material, flaked finer than any metal edge, is still used for surgical blades?
Obsidian
Obsidian is volcanic glass, and a well-made blade's cutting edge is only about three nanometers thick. US regulators have not approved it for use on people, though it is sold for operations on research animals.
Q 06Which insects' powerful jaws do some East African peoples use as emergency stitches for wounds?
Ants
Ants of the driver ant group grip so hard that Maasai warriors let soldiers bite both sides of a gash, then break off the bodies. The jaws stay clamped in place.
Q 07Which Roman city buried by Vesuvius has a house named after the surgical instruments found there?
Pompeii
Pompeii's House of the Surgeon was excavated in 1770 by Francesco La Vega and is one of the best-known homes in the ruined city.
Q 08Which insect names the most delicate surgical hemostats, made with smaller, finer tips?
Mosquito
Mosquito hemostats are a slimmer version of the standard locking clamp that surgeons use to pinch an artery shut and forestall blood loss.
Q 09Which profession did Manuel García follow when he built a two-mirror tool to watch living vocal cords?
Singing teacher
A singing teacher, García built a tool from two mirrors in 1854 and used the Sun as his light source. Until 1895 every view of the larynx still relied on mirrors like his.
Q 10What does the Gamma Knife, a brain surgery tool invented in Stockholm, use in place of a blade?
Radiation beams
Radiation beams from about 200 cobalt sources, arranged in a helmet-like dome, are concentrated on one tiny target inside the brain.
Q 11Which alloy, credited to Sheffield metallurgist Harry Brearley, are surgical instruments usually made from?
Stainless steel
Stainless steel was first called rustless steel by Brearley, until Ernest Stuart suggested the more euphonic name. Its resistance to corrosion suits tools that are washed and steamed daily.
Q 12Which instrument did Morgan Parker redesign in 1915 with a reusable handle and replaceable blade?
Scalpel
The scalpel handle is still called a B.P. handle after Parker and his partner Charles Russell Bard. Their firm also devised a cold sterilizing method that did not dull the edge.
Q 13Which organ lends its shape and name to the shallow basin for soiled dressings in surgical wards?
Kidney
Q 21Which bones does the hand-cranked Finochietto spreader, refined by an Argentine surgeon, pry apart?
The ribs
The ribs are levered apart in stages by a hand crank that locks at each stop. Enrique Finochietto added it in 1936, along with windowed blades, to a French design of 1914.
Q 22Which instrument for holding open body passages is named from the Latin word for mirror?
Speculum
The duck-billed vaginal speculum began as a pewter spoon, bent into shape in the 1840s by J. Marion Sims during operations he performed on enslaved women.
Q 23What does the Bovie, a surgical tool first used by Harvey Cushing, use to cut and seal tissue?
Electric current
Kidney dishes curve so they can be held snug against a patient's body to catch whatever falls. Americans usually call one an emesis basin.
Q 14Which item, counted in and counted out, is the object most often left inside surgical patients?
A sponge
A sponge left behind even has its own medical name, gossypiboma. Some operating rooms now tag each one with a radio chip so it can be tracked.
Q 15Which steam chamber, invented by Charles Chamberland in 1879, is used to sterilize surgical tools?
Autoclave
The autoclave had an ancestor two centuries older: Denis Papin's steam digester of 1679, the same device that led to the kitchen pressure cooker.
Q 16Which gas is usually pumped into the abdomen in laparoscopic surgery to make room to work?
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide is inexpensive and dissolves readily in blood. It is also colorless and cannot catch fire.
Q 17Which gemstone forms the edge of the surgical knives used in vision-correcting eye operations?
Diamond
Diamond knives were invented in 1955 by Humberto Fernández-Morán. They are costly and must be professionally resharpened, but they also cut ultrathin slices for microscopes.
Q 18Which dog breed names the spring-action surgical clamps also known as serrefines?
Bulldog
Bulldog clamps hold on with a spring instead of a locking handle. The spring may be weak, or the jaws sheathed in soft material, so a blood vessel survives the grip.
Q 19Which American medical center names the heavy surgical scissors that cut tough tissue and stitches?
Mayo Clinic
Mayo Clinic surgeons developed the heavy-bladed design for dense tissue such as fascia. The straight version trims so many stitches that it is nicknamed suture scissors.
Q 20Which operation was the Liston knife, named after a famously fast Scottish surgeon, made for?
Amputation
Amputation knives had distinctive down-curving blades until the 1840s. By 1870 they had straightened to resemble the style that Robert Liston favored.
Electric current above certain frequencies can cut tissue without making muscles contract, the insight physicist William Bovie built on. Before its 1926 debut, blood loss was the great obstacle in brain surgery.
Q 24Which surgical instruments, such as the Deaver and the Richardson, hold an incision's edges apart?
Retractors
Retractors come in two basic types. Hand-held ones need an assistant to keep pulling, while self-retaining ones stay open by themselves once they are set.
Q 25Which Swiss surgeon, the first of his profession to win a Nobel Prize, invented a surgical clamp?
Theodor Kocher
Theodor Kocher won the 1909 prize for his work on the thyroid gland, and the money helped him found a research institute in Bern. His clamp dates from 1882.
Q 26Which Houston heart surgeon names the surgical forceps made to hold blood vessels without damage?
Michael DeBakey
Michael DeBakey developed them during his decades at Baylor College of Medicine. They are unusually long, and a coarse grip pattern sets them apart from other tissue forceps.
Q 27Which founding Johns Hopkins professor of gynecology names a curved, scissor-like hemostat?
Howard Kelly
Howard Kelly was one of the hospital's Big Four founding professors. His clamp grips with blunt ridges instead of sharp teeth or blades.
Q 28Which family of surgeons kept the obstetric forceps a secret in England for about 150 years?
The Chamberlens
The Chamberlens were Huguenots who had fled France, and their hidden tool for delivering a live child in difficult births won them royal and noble clients.
Q 29Which surgeon of Muslim Spain wrote the first illustrated guide to surgery and its instruments?
Al-Zahrawi
Al-Zahrawi, known in the West as Albucasis, introduced over 200 instruments in it. In the 14th century the French surgeon Guy de Chauliac quoted his encyclopedia over 200 times.
Q 30Which loop-tipped instrument scrapes the lining of the uterus in the procedure known as a D&C?
Curette
A curette for this job is a metal rod with a handle at one end and a loop at the other. The C in D&C stands for curettage, the act of scraping.