Traditional Medicine
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50 free Traditional Medicine trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Long before laboratories and clinical trials, every culture built its own way of treating the sick, and a surprising amount of that knowledge is still in use. Some old remedies turned out to hide powerful drugs. Others were useless, or dangerous, and were sold for centuries anyway. This quiz covers traditional medicine across the world: the great healing systems of India, East Asia and the Islamic world, the healers of Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, the herbs and spices found in kitchen cupboards and pharmacies alike, the physicians and herbalists whose books shaped practice for generations, and the stranger cures of old Europe. Several questions follow a folk remedy from the forest or the garden into the modern hospital. It is written for curious general players as much as for students of herbalism, pharmacy or the history of medicine, and it works well for a themed quiz night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn the story behind each remedy whether or not you get it right.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Powdered bark from which tree, praised for curing fevers in 1763, later led chemists toward aspirin?
Willow
Willow bark holds salicin, which Johann Buchner crystallised in 1828. Bayer settled on the name Aspirin for its related synthetic drug in 1899.
Q 02Which US president died in 1799 after doctors treating a throat infection drained several pints of blood?
George Washington
George Washington believed in bleeding and had his overseer open a vein before any doctor arrived. His physicians then bled him several more times, and he died that night.
Q 03Which ancient remains, ground to powder, did chemist Robert Boyle praise as a useful medicine for falls and bruises?
Mummies
Mummies were ground into a drug called mummia that European apothecaries sold from the 12th century. After exports were banned in the 16th century, some faked it by embalming fresh corpses.
Q 04Which animal most often supplied the unicorn horn that apothecaries sold as a universal antidote until the 18th century?
Narwhal
Narwhal tusks, which are really overgrown teeth, were traded as unicorn horn for centuries. Danish kings even had a throne made from them.
Q 05In 1916 US chemists found that Clark Stanley's famous liniment contained none of which ingredient named on its label?
Snake oil
Snake oil was missing entirely: the liniment was mostly mineral oil with chili pepper extract and turpentine. Stanley's $20 fine helped turn the name into a byword for fraud.
Q 06Which creatures, long used by doctors to draw blood from patients, did the US FDA classify as a medical device in 2004?
Leeches
Leeches made a comeback in 1970s microsurgery, where they keep blood moving through reattached fingers and ears. Their bite injects an anticoagulant called hirudin.
Q 07Physician William Withering's 1785 study of a folk cure for dropsy revealed the heart drug in which garden flower?
Foxglove
Foxglove was the active part of a secret recipe an old woman had long kept to herself. Its heart compounds, such as digitoxin, take their names from Digitalis, the plant's Latin name.
Q 08Which food, a folk dressing for wounds since ancient Greece, now comes in medical grades approved for minor burns?
Honey
Honey in medical grades is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for minor wounds and burns. Early evidence suggests some burns heal four to five days faster under it.
Q 09Which tradesmen once carried out bloodletting, a job recalled by the red and white pole outside their shops?
Barbers
Barbers did the bleeding that physicians recommended. On the striped pole, the red stands for blood and the white for bandages.
Q 10Researchers watched which wild ape, named Rakus, heal a facial wound by applying chewed leaves of a medicinal vine?
Orangutan
A Sumatran orangutan pressed the chewed pulp onto an open wound on his face. Five days later it had closed, and within weeks only a small scar was left.
Q 11The name Ayurveda joins words for life and knowledge taken from which classical language of India?
Sanskrit
Sanskrit ayus means life or longevity and veda means knowledge. The earliest classical works on the system divide medicine into eight components.
Q 12Ayurveda holds that good health depends on balancing three doshas: vata, pitta and which other?
Kapha
Kapha is the dosha of earth and water, often glossed as phlegm. Vata is tied to air, and pitta to fire and bile.
Q 13Which healing tradition of South and Central Asia, built on medieval Arabic medicine, has a name that means Greek?
Unani
Unani rests on the teachings of the physicians of ancient Greece, handed on in Arabic. Its name goes back to Ionia, a region on the eastern Aegean coast.
Q 21Twigs of which tree, also known as Indian lilac, are traditionally chewed in southern India to clean the teeth?
Neem
Neem twigs double as toothbrushes in the Middle East as well. The tree is a member of the mahogany family and also goes by the name margosa.
Q 22Which succulent from the Arabian Peninsula supplies the gel used in many lotions for minor burns and insect bites?
Aloe vera
Aloe vera is thought to be native to the Hajar Mountains of Oman and the UAE. It now grows wild in tropical and arid climates around the world.
Q 23Which pungent root, used for centuries in traditional medicine across Asia, is often taken for nausea in pregnancy?
Ginger
Ginger may beat a placebo for pregnancy sickness, though the evidence is of low quality. There is no good evidence that it helps with nausea from chemotherapy.
Q 14Which ancient Greek physician, traditionally called the father of medicine, taught that four body fluids govern health?
Hippocrates
Hippocrates saw illness as an imbalance of these fluids, the humours. Treatments such as bleeding and purging were meant to expel whichever one was in surplus.
Q 15Followers of the four humours blamed an excess of yellow bile for which of the classical temperaments?
Choleric
Choleric people were thought ambitious, decisive and short-tempered. Black bile, melaina kholé in Greek, gave its name to the melancholy type instead.
Q 16The ancient Indian text Sushruta Samhita describes rebuilding which body part with a flap of skin from the cheek?
The nose
The nose could be rebuilt after it had been cut off, an operation now called rhinoplasty. The same treatise describes 1,120 illnesses and 700 medicinal plants.
Q 17Which old belief held that a plant resembling a body part would heal it, so walnuts were prescribed for head ailments?
Doctrine of signatures
Doctrine of signatures thinking also made eyebright a treatment for eye infections, because its flower was supposed to look like an eye.
Q 18Which traditional Chinese therapy did UNESCO add to its intangible heritage list in 2010 together with moxibustion?
Acupuncture
Acupuncture was inscribed after China nominated the pair. Gold and silver needles from a tomb of about 100 BC may be the earliest physical evidence of it.
Q 19Tu Youyou won a Nobel Prize after a recipe from the year 340 led her to a malaria drug in which herb?
Sweet wormwood
Sweet wormwood had long been used for intermittent fevers. The old text said to steep it in cold water, which led Tu to a low-temperature extraction that worked.
Q 20Which golden-yellow spice, long used in Ayurvedic medicine, is pasted on brides and grooms before many Hindu weddings?
Turmeric
Turmeric owes its colour to curcumin. Despite centuries of use, there is no high-quality clinical evidence that eating it treats any disease.
Q 24Which daisy-like herb, widely drunk as a tea, can trigger allergic reactions in people sensitive to ragweed?
Chamomile
Chamomile is a name shared by several daisy-like plants. Besides tea, it is used to flavour beer and is even grown as a seating plant in gardens.
Q 25Which coneflower of the Great Plains, used by some Native American tribes for cold symptoms, is sold as a cold remedy?
Echinacea
Echinacea is said to owe its modern fame to a Swiss supplement maker who heard of its use in South Dakota. A 2014 meta-analysis found no conclusive proof that it prevents or treats colds.
Q 26Oil from which spice, rich in the compound eugenol, is a traditional remedy for the pain of toothache?
Cloves
Cloves are the flower buds of a tree native to the Maluku Islands. There is evidence that their oil does ease toothache and other kinds of pain.
Q 27Which herb, named for a saint's feast day on 24 June, is approved in the European Union for mild depression?
St John's wort
St John's wort was gathered at midsummer and hung on doors to ward off evil spirits. It can interfere with other medicines by speeding up their breakdown in the body.
Q 28Bark from which South American tree, nicknamed the fever tree, gave the world the malaria drug quinine?
Cinchona
Cinchona bark was so prized that Peru and its neighbours outlawed the export of seeds and saplings in the 19th century. Peru's national tree belongs to the genus.
Q 29Which island is the only native home of the rose periwinkle, source of the cancer drugs vincristine and vinblastine?
Madagascar
Madagascar gave the plant one of its common names. The cancer drugs were a chance find of the 1950s, when researchers were screening it for anti-diabetic compounds.
Q 30Sangoma, a word used loosely for every kind of traditional healer in southern Africa, comes from which language?
Zulu
Zulu speakers separate the sangoma, who heals mainly through divination, from the inyanga, a herbalist working with plant and animal medicines.