150 Fun Facts About Healthcare

Which South African surgeon performed the first human-to-human heart transplant, in 1967?

Christiaan Barnard performed the first human-to-human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, on 3 December 1967; patient Louis Washkansky lived 18 days before pneumonia, worsened by anti-rejection drugs, killed him.

Which organ is considered the largest in the human body?

Skin is the largest organ, and it never stops renewing itself: new cells form at the base of the outer layer and rise to replace old ones that flake off.

A prolonged deficiency of which vitamin is known to cause scurvy?

Vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy; in 1747 naval surgeon James Lind compared six remedies on sick sailors, and those given citrus fruit recovered, in one of the first controlled trials.

Which condition causes around 60 to 70 percent of dementia cases?

Alzheimer's is named for Alois Alzheimer, who in 1906 examined the brain of his late patient Auguste Deter and found the plaques and tangles that still define the disease.

What is the medical term for the surgical removal of the gallbladder?

A cholecystectomy removes the gallbladder, most often because of painful gallstones; nearly all are now keyhole operations, and people live normally afterwards because the organ is not essential.

Which scientist is credited with developing the first successful vaccine, specifically for smallpox?

Edward Jenner tested his idea in 1796 by scratching matter from a milkmaid's cowpox sore into eight-year-old James Phipps; exposed to smallpox two months later, the boy stayed well.

What is considered the largest internal organ in the human body by weight?

The liver, the heaviest internal organ and the body's largest gland, can regrow: when a living donor gives part of theirs away, the remainder returns to normal size.

How many permanent teeth does an adult human usually have?

32 teeth make a full adult set, but the last four, the wisdom teeth, arrive in the late teens or twenties and often lack room to come through, so many adults have them taken out.

Who is traditionally credited with inventing the stethoscope in the early 19th century?

René Laennec, working at Paris's Hôpital Necker in 1816, found that a rolled paper cylinder let him hear a patient's heart more clearly than pressing his ear to her chest.

In which Swiss city is the World Health Organization headquartered?

Geneva has housed the WHO since its constitution came into force on 7 April 1948, a date now marked every year as World Health Day.

What figure is widely cited as the average internal human body temperature in Celsius?

37 °C (98.6 °F) became the benchmark through German physician Carl Wunderlich's 1868 book; modern studies put the average a little lower, and Stanford researchers found it has drifted down since his day.

A doctor specializing in heart and blood vessel conditions is known as what?

A cardiologist diagnoses and treats heart and blood-vessel disease; cardiology is a sub-specialty of internal medicine, while operations on the heart are left to cardiothoracic surgeons.

Which blood type is the 'universal donor' for red blood cells?

O Negative blood lacks A, B and Rh antigens, so it can go to patients of any type, which makes it vital in emergencies when there is no time to test.

Which Scottish microbiologist's contaminated petri dish in 1928 yielded penicillin?

Alexander Fleming came back from holiday to find mould on a culture dish he had left out, with the bacteria around it dying off; Howard Florey and Ernst Chain later turned penicillin into a usable drug.

What is the longest bone in the human body?

The femur, or thigh bone, runs to about a quarter of a person's height, so forensic anthropologists can estimate how tall someone stood from this one bone.

What is the normal resting heart-rate range for an adult, in beats per minute?

The American Heart Association gives 60-100 beats per minute as the normal adult resting range; a rate below 60 is bradycardia, where trained endurance athletes often sit.

Which German physicist discovered X-rays in 1895?

Wilhelm Röntgen found the rays in November 1895 while experimenting with cathode-ray tubes at Würzburg; in German and several other languages X-rays are called Röntgen rays.

Which imaging technique uses a strong magnetic field and radio waves to image organs?

MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) aligns hydrogen nuclei in a strong magnetic field and reads the radio-frequency signals they emit; unlike CT and PET it uses no ionizing radiation.

Which hormone is deficient or ineffective in people with diabetes, leading to high blood sugar levels?

Insulin, made in the pancreas, was isolated in 1921 by Frederick Banting and Charles Best in Toronto, working with dogs; it turned diabetes from a death sentence into a condition people live with.

A doctor who specializes in the medical and surgical care of the eyes is known as what?

An ophthalmologist is a medical doctor trained to operate on the eyes; an optometrist tests sight and prescribes lenses but is not a physician, and an optician fits the glasses.

Which drug class, ibuprofen included, dulls pain and swelling by blocking the body's prostaglandin supply?

NSAIDs block the COX enzymes that make prostaglandins, but those chemicals also protect the stomach lining, which is why long use of ibuprofen or naproxen can cause ulcers.

Which father of germ theory gave his name to the heat-treatment process that makes milk safe?

Louis Pasteur devised the process for wine, not milk: in 1864 he found that briefly heating it to 50-60 °C killed the microbes that turned it sour.

Which organ, passed between identical twins in 1954, was the first transplanted successfully?

A kidney went from Ronald Herrick to his dying twin Richard in 1954; surgeon Joseph Murray chose identical twins because matching tissue made rejection far less likely, and later won a Nobel Prize.

Which gland at the base of the brain is nicknamed the 'master gland'?

The pituitary is no bigger than a pea, yet the hormones it releases control growth and tell the body's other hormone glands when to work.

Which disease did the World Health Organization certify wiped off the planet in 1980?

Smallpox's last natural case was a young Somali hospital worker, Ali Maow Maalin, in 1977; he recovered and later spent years as a vaccination campaigner in his own country.

The common cold is primarily caused by what type of pathogen?

A virus causes every cold, and more than 200 different ones can do it, most often rhinoviruses, which is why no single vaccine exists and why antibiotics, which only work on bacteria, do not help.

Which artery, the body's largest, carries blood straight out of the left ventricle?

The aorta carries all the blood bound for the body, so a weak spot in its wall is dangerous: the bulge, called an aneurysm, causes massive internal bleeding if it bursts.

Which ancient Greek physician is traditionally called the 'Father of Medicine'?

Hippocrates of Kos, active around 400 BC, is credited with the Hippocratic Oath and with humoral theory, which medicine later discarded.

Which organ under the left ribs filters worn-out red blood cells from the blood?

The spleen also holds a reserve of blood and helps fight germs, yet people can live without one: after a splenectomy other organs take over much of its work, at the cost of a higher risk of infection.

How many bones are typically in the adult human skeleton?

206 bones make up a typical adult skeleton, but a baby is born with many more; they fuse as the child grows, as in the sacrum, where five vertebrae become one bone.

Which Edinburgh obstetrician introduced chloroform as a surgical anaesthetic in November 1847?

James Young Simpson tested chloroform on himself and two assistants at his Edinburgh dinner table on 4 November 1847 and was using it for childbirth within days.

Which blood component clumps together at the site of a vessel injury to form a clot?

Platelets are not whole cells but fragments shed by giant bone-marrow cells called megakaryocytes; at a wound they stick to the vessel wall and to each other to plug the leak.

Which broad group of diseases is defined by abnormal cells dividing without control and spreading into other tissues?

Cancer is Latin for crab: ancient Greek physicians thought the swollen veins spreading out from some growths looked like a crab's legs, and the name stuck.

What is the name of the medical device used to measure blood pressure?

A sphygmomanometer squeezes the arm with an inflatable cuff; readings are still given in millimetres of mercury because the classic instrument balanced blood pressure against a mercury column.

Which part of the brain coordinates voluntary movement, balance and posture?

The cerebellum, Latin for 'little brain', fine-tunes movement rather than initiating it; damage produces clumsiness, poor balance and trouble with motor learning.

Which condition, curable by surgery, was the leading cause of blindness worldwide in 2020?

Cataracts cloud the eye's lens, and swapping it for an artificial one is a short operation; they still lead the causes of blindness because, by the WHO's estimate, half the people who need that surgery cannot get it.

What medical condition is characterized by persistently high blood pressure?

Hypertension usually causes no symptoms, so a great many people who have it do not know, and the only way to find out is to have a cuff reading taken.

Which stirrup-shaped bone of the middle ear is the smallest in the human body?

The stapes, or stirrup, is the last of three tiny bones that pass sound from the eardrum to the fluid of the inner ear; they amplify the vibrations, which would otherwise mostly bounce off the liquid.

What protein is responsible for transporting oxygen in the blood?

Hemoglobin is the iron-rich protein packed into red blood cells; it picks up oxygen in the lungs and releases it around the body, and it turns blood bright red when loaded with oxygen.

Which condition, most common in women after menopause, makes bones weak, brittle and prone to fractures?

Osteoporosis, from the Greek for 'porous bone', usually gives no warning until a bone breaks, often a hip, wrist or vertebra after only a minor fall.

In MRSA, the superbug that haunts hospital wards, what does the 'M' stand for?

MRSA is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus; methicillin, a penicillin derivative introduced in 1959, was defeated by resistant strains first reported in Britain in 1961.

What is the medical term for localized swelling caused by fluid retention in the body's tissues?

Edema, once called dropsy, shows most in the feet, ankles and legs because gravity pulls the fluid down, which is why raising the legs helps the swelling go down.

Which Hungarian doctor cut childbed fever deaths in 1847 by making Vienna hospital staff wash their hands?

Ignaz Semmelweis had staff wash in a chlorine solution, and deaths on the doctors' ward fell sharply; his colleagues rejected the idea, he lost his post, and he died in an asylum in 1865.

How many chambers does a healthy adult human heart typically have?

Four chambers let the heart run two circuits at once: the right atrium and ventricle send blood to the lungs for oxygen, while the left pair pumps it out to the rest of the body.

What is the medical term for an immune reaction to a normally harmless substance?

An allergy is the immune system overreacting to something harmless: it releases histamine, which is why antihistamines ease the sneezing and itching; the most severe form is anaphylaxis.

Which infectious disease is caused by a parasite transmitted through the bite of an infected mosquito?

Malaria is spread by female Anopheles mosquitoes; its name is Italian for 'bad air', from the old belief that vapours rising from swamps caused it.

Which organ absorbs most of the remaining water from digested food before waste leaves the body?

The large intestine is only about 1.5 metres long, far shorter than the small intestine; it earns its name by being wider, and it absorbs water and salts from what is left of a meal.

What is the medical term for a sudden interruption of blood supply to part of the brain?

A stroke is usually a clot blocking a vessel, and clot-busting drugs only work in the first few hours, which is why the FAST check ends with T for time: face, arms, speech, time to call for help.

Which healthcare professional restores movement after injury or surgery through exercise and hands-on techniques?

A physiotherapist, called a physical therapist in the US, works in a profession that took shape there in the First World War, when 'reconstruction aides' were recruited to get wounded soldiers moving again.

What diagnostic procedure involves removing a tissue sample from the body for microscopic examination?

A biopsy is often the only way to tell for sure whether a suspicious lump is malignant, something scans alone cannot settle; the sample is examined under a microscope.

The word 'hospital' comes from the Latin hospes, meaning what?

A guest or stranger is what Latin hospes meant, which is why medieval hospitals were as much almshouses and pilgrim hostels as places of treatment; 'hostel' and 'hospitality' share the root.

Which London hospital housed Florence Nightingale's nursing school, founded in 1860?

St Thomas' Hospital opened the Nightingale Training School in 1860, paid for by a fund the public gave in her honour; its graduates were then sent to hospitals across Britain to spread her methods.

Florence Nightingale rose to fame organising care for wounded soldiers during which war?

Nightingale led nurses at the Scutari barracks hospital during the Crimean War (1853-56); she later concluded that most deaths there were caused by poor sanitation rather than wounds.

The world's first intensive care unit was set up in Copenhagen in 1953 during an epidemic of which disease?

During Copenhagen's 1952-53 polio epidemic, anaesthetist Bjørn Ibsen had medical students ventilate paralysed patients by hand around the clock; in 1953 he opened the first intensive care unit.

Sorting emergency patients by how urgently they need care is known by what French-derived term?

Triage comes from the French trier, 'to sort'; Napoleon's surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey set the rule on the battlefield, treating the most urgent wounds first whatever the soldier's rank.

What did trauma surgeon R Adams Cowley call the first 60 minutes after a severe injury?

The golden hour: Cowley, founder of the first US shock-trauma centre at the University of Maryland, argued that the badly injured do far better if treated within it, and pioneered flying them in by helicopter.

Johns Hopkins Hospital, credited with inventing residencies and rounds, opened in 1889 where?

Baltimore merchant Johns Hopkins left about $7 million, then the largest bequest in American history, to found the hospital and a university; William Osler built its residency system and taught students at the bedside.

The Mayo Clinic grew from a family practice opened in 1864 in which Minnesota city?

Rochester was hit by a tornado in 1883; W. W. Mayo ran the care of the injured, and the Franciscan sisters who nursed them then built Saint Marys Hospital, where his sons Will and Charlie grew the practice into a clinic.

Ambulances were first used for emergency transport in 1487 by which army, during the siege of Málaga?

The Spanish army of Ferdinand and Isabella brought 'ambulancias', field hospitals for its wounded, to the siege; the word, from Latin ambulare, 'to walk', first meant a hospital that moved with an army.

Which Persian physician's Canon of Medicine was a standard European medical text into the 1600s?

Avicenna (Ibn Sina) was a prodigy: by 17 he was physician to the ruler of Bukhara, and the five-book Canon he completed in 1025 stayed a standard medical textbook in Europe for centuries.

At which hospital did dentist William Morton first publicly demonstrate ether anaesthesia, on 16 October 1846?

Massachusetts General hosted the demonstration in its surgical amphitheatre, now called the Ether Dome, where surgeon John Collins Warren removed a neck tumour from Gilbert Abbott while Morton gave the ether.

Henri Dunant, whose Solferino book led to the Red Cross, shared which inaugural honour in 1901?

Dunant shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 with French pacifist Frédéric Passy; he had paid to publish A Memory of Solferino himself in 1862 and mailed it to Europe's leaders.

In many American, Canadian and Australian hospitals, 'code blue' announced over the public-address system means what?

A patient in cardiac arrest is a code blue, while 'code red' usually means fire, though codes vary so much between hospitals that standardised sets have been proposed.

Which Dutch draper first described bacteria, his 'animalcules', through home-made microscopes in 1676?

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Delft cloth merchant with no scientific training, ground single lenses that magnified over 200 times and reported what he saw in letters to London's Royal Society for fifty years.

Whose hand did the discoverer of X-rays photograph in December 1895?

His wife's hand was the subject: on 22 December 1895 the photographic plate showed the shadows of Anna Bertha's bones and of the ring she was wearing, with only a faint outline of the flesh.

Britain's National Health Service was launched in 1948 at Park Hospital, Davyhulme, on the edge of which north-west English city?

Manchester: health minister Aneurin Bevan came to Park Hospital, now Trafford General, on 5 July 1948, was handed its keys and met 13-year-old Sylvia Beckingham, the first NHS patient.

Who became the first recipients of US Medicare when Lyndon Johnson signed it into law in July 1965?

Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri, to sign the bill beside the man who had asked Congress for national health insurance two decades earlier; Harry and Bess Truman became Medicare's first two enrollees.

Médecins Sans Frontières was founded in 1971 by French doctors who had witnessed the Biafran famine of which war?

The Nigerian Civil War: French doctors who had volunteered with the Red Cross in blockaded Biafra publicly criticised both the Nigerian government and the Red Cross, then founded an aid group of their own.

Which device did surgeon Claude Beck first use successfully on a human heart in 1947?

Defibrillator: Beck shocked the exposed heart of a 14-year-old boy back into rhythm on the operating table; physiologists Prévost and Batelli had shown the effect in dogs back in 1899.

How deep should adult chest compressions be during CPR?

Guidelines since 2015 call for adult compressions 5 to 6 cm deep (about 2 to 2.4 inches) at 100 to 120 per minute, with or without rescue breaths.

Louise Brown, born in England in 1978, was the first baby conceived by which technique?

In vitro fertilisation produced Louise Brown at Oldham General Hospital; her sister Natalie, also an IVF baby, became in 1999 the first person conceived that way to have a child of her own.

Who in 1849 became the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States?

Elizabeth Blackwell's admission to a small medical college in western New York was put to a vote of the all-male students, who approved it as a joke; she graduated in January 1849 and later opened an infirmary for women.

What did Karl Landsteiner discover in 1901 by mixing different people's blood?

Blood groups: Landsteiner showed that people's blood falls into distinct types, which explained why transfusions had so often ended in disaster; the discovery won him the 1930 Nobel Prize.

Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven won the 1924 Nobel Prize for inventing which device?

The electrocardiograph Einthoven built around a string galvanometer was a monster needing several operators, and patients sat with their limbs in tubs of salt water as electrodes; his P, Q, R, S and T labels are still used.

Willem Kolff built the first working dialysis machine in 1943 in which occupied country?

Kolff built it in Kampen, in the German-occupied Netherlands, out of scavenged parts such as sausage casings and juice cans; after the war he moved to the US and worked on artificial hearts.

Arne Larsson got the world's first fully implantable pacemaker in 1958 in which country?

The operation took place at Sweden's Karolinska Institute in Solna on 8 October 1958, with a device by Rune Elmqvist and surgeon Åke Senning; the first unit failed within hours, and Larsson went through 26 pacemakers.

Which German chancellor's 1883 Sickness Insurance Bill pioneered state health cover?

Otto von Bismarck, no socialist, pushed the programme partly to undercut the appeal of the Social Democrats among industrial workers; employers paid one-third of the cost and workers two-thirds.

Godfrey Hounsfield, Nobel co-winner for the CT scanner, spent his career at which firm better known for records?

EMI, the Beatles' record label, first put Hounsfield to work on radar and guided weapons; the Hounsfield scale used to read every CT scan is named for him.

Which physician gave Queen Victoria chloroform during childbirth in 1853?

John Snow, the doctor who traced a London cholera outbreak to a street water pump, gave the Queen chloroform for Prince Leopold's birth and did so again for Beatrice's in 1857.

Joseph Lister pioneered antiseptic surgery in 1860s Glasgow using which steriliser?

Lister had read that carbolic acid was being used to treat sewage in Carlisle. The mouthwash Listerine was later named in his honour, though he had nothing to do with it.

Which former Civil War nurse founded the American Red Cross in 1881?

Clara Barton had seen the Red Cross at work in Europe during the Franco-Prussian War; she founded the American branch at 59 and led it for 23 years.

Ebola takes its name from a river in which present-day country?

The 1976 outbreak began in the village of Yambuku in what was then Zaire, now DR Congo; researchers reportedly chose the nearby river's name to avoid stigmatising the village itself.

FDA reviewer Frances Kelsey is celebrated for refusing to approve which drug?

Thalidomide, a sedative already sold in Europe, caused thousands of severe birth defects; Kelsey held up its US approval in 1960-61, and President Kennedy gave her the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service in 1962.

In which country did Isabelle Dinoire receive the world's first partial face transplant in 2005?

France: surgeons in Amiens spent 15 hours grafting a donor's nose, lips and chin onto Dinoire, whose pet dog had mauled her face while she lay unconscious; she died in 2016 aged 49.

Earle Dickson invented the Band-Aid in 1920 for his wife while employed by which company?

Josephine Dickson kept cutting and burning herself while cooking, so Earle stuck gauze to strips of surgical tape that she could apply without help; Johnson & Johnson took the idea to market and later made him a vice-president.

Which German firm named Aspirin and began selling it worldwide in the late 1890s?

Bayer built the name from a(cetyl) and Spirsäure, an old German term for salicylic acid that comes from Spiraea, the former genus name of meadowsweet; the trademark was later lost or sold in many countries.

Which medical journal was founded in 1823 by English surgeon Thomas Wakley?

Wakley named The Lancet after the small surgical blade and used it to attack nepotism and incompetence in London's medical establishment; early issues reprinted lectures that students otherwise paid to hear.

The two-snake winged caduceus, often mistaken for medicine's one-snake Rod of Asclepius, is really the staff of which Greek god?

Hermes, god of trade and thieves with no link to healing, carried the caduceus; it spread as a medical emblem in the US after the Army Medical Corps put it on its uniforms in 1902.

Which English nurse-turned-doctor is credited with starting the modern hospice movement?

Cicely Saunders opened St Christopher's Hospice in south London in 1967, seeded by 500 pounds left to her in 1948 by David Tasma, a dying Polish refugee who asked to be 'a window in your home'.

The first pulse oximeter was developed in 1972 by bioengineers working in which country?

Japan's Takuo Aoyagi, an engineer at Nihon Kohden, was improving a device for measuring blood flow in 1972 when he realised that the pulse itself, until then just noise in the readings, could reveal how much oxygen arterial blood carries.

Which three-digit number became the world's first emergency phone line when it launched in London in 1937?

999 was set up after a 1935 house fire in London's Wimpole Street killed five women, while a neighbour trying to call the fire brigade was held in a queue at the telephone exchange.

Mary Eliza Mahoney, America's first Black professional nurse, trained in which New England city?

Boston's New England Hospital for Women and Children had employed Mahoney for years as a cook and washerwoman before admitting her to its training school, where she was one of the few in her class to finish.

The Apgar score, devised in 1952 by anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar, assesses whom?

Newborn babies are scored 0 to 2 on each of five criteria at one and five minutes after birth; the backronym Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration was coined later to fit her surname.

The BCG vaccine, named for Calmette and Guerin, is primarily used against which disease?

BCG is a live attenuated strain of Mycobacterium bovis, the cattle cousin of the tuberculosis bacterium, first given to a human in 1921; it is also instilled into the bladder to treat early bladder cancer.

Emil von Behring won the first-ever Nobel in Medicine for serum therapy against what?

Behring's diphtheria antitoxin, announced with Shibasaburo Kitasato in 1890 and produced by immunising horses, won the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1901; Kitasato was passed over.

William Harvey's 1628 treatise De Motu Cordis was the first full account of what?

The circulation of the blood: Harvey measured what the heart pumps out with each beat and found it far more than the body could keep making afresh, so the same blood had to be going round and round.

Abdominal thrusts for a choking person are named after which American doctor?

Henry Heimlich described the technique in a 1974 magazine article titled 'Pop Goes the Cafe Coronary'; a syndicated Chicago newspaper column spread it, and about a week later a reader used it to save a choking woman.

Theodor Kocher, the first surgeon to win a Nobel Prize, was honoured in 1909 for operating on goitres of which gland?

Thyroid operations were among the most feared in surgery until Kocher, in Bern, showed they could be done safely through strict hygiene and minimal blood loss, cutting deaths to under one in a hundred.

Dentist Horace Wells pioneered which anaesthetic after seeing a stage show in 1844?

The day after seeing a clerk hurt himself painlessly under nitrous oxide at Gardner Colton's laughing-gas show in Hartford, Wells had his own wisdom tooth pulled while inhaling it; he refused to patent the idea.

Vesalius's 1543 anatomy book De Humani Corporis Fabrica overturned which ancient author?

Galen had dissected animals, mainly apes, not humans, and Vesalius saw the mismatch once he dissected human bodies himself; he was only 28 when the lavishly illustrated work, in seven books, appeared in Basel.

Martin Couney saved premature infants by exhibiting them in incubators at which New York resort?

Coney Island visitors paid 25 cents to enter his 'Infantorium', and the takings meant parents were never charged. He is credited with saving more than 6,500 lives.

Which Bee Gees disco hit do CPR trainers use to help rescuers pace chest compressions at the recommended rate?

Stayin' Alive runs at about 103 beats per minute, inside the 100 to 120 compressions a minute rescuers are taught. The American Heart Association built a training campaign around it.

CPR manikin Resusci Anne's face was copied from the death mask of a woman said to have drowned in which river?

The Seine is where the unidentified young woman reputedly drowned in the late 1880s. Norwegian toymaker Åsmund Lærdal gave her face to the first manikin, unveiled in 1960.

The Red Cross emblem was created by reversing the colours of which country's national flag?

Switzerland's white cross on red was flipped to honour the nation that hosted the first Geneva Convention in 1864 and produced co-founder Henry Dunant.

Which crime novelist learned about poisons while working in a Torquay hospital dispensary during the First World War?

Agatha Christie qualified as an apothecary's assistant in 1917, and the murder method in her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, came straight from the dispensary.

Which fictional detective was inspired by Joseph Bell, an Edinburgh surgeon who diagnosed by observation alone?

Sherlock Holmes owes his method to Bell, who brought unknown out-patients into lectures and deduced their jobs and recent activities. Arthur Conan Doyle had served as his clerk.

Which children's story has paid royalties to Great Ormond Street Hospital since its author donated the rights?

Peter Pan kept paying after its UK copyright expired in 1987, because Parliament granted the hospital a perpetual right to royalties. J. M. Barrie asked that the income never be disclosed.

Which sea creature's blue blood is used to test injectable drugs and medical devices for bacterial toxins?

Horseshoe crab blood clots into a gel around bacterial toxins, an effect researcher Fred Bang reported in 1956. Copper, not iron, carries its oxygen, hence the blue.

During the Middle Ages, which tradesmen performed surgery and pulled teeth alongside their everyday work?

Barbers shared a London guild with surgeons from 1540 until the surgeons broke away in 1745. The striped barber's pole recalls the staff patients gripped while being bled.

Which creature did the US Food and Drug Administration classify as a medical device in 2004?

Leeches earned the label because surgeons use them to relieve pooled blood after reattaching fingers and ears. Their saliva carries hirudin, a natural anticoagulant.

In hospital orders, the word 'stat' is short for the Latin statim, which means what in English?

Immediately is all the Latin means, and the clipped form has been written on prescriptions since the 1870s. It later escaped the wards as a jokey way of saying right away.

What does the M stand for in MASH, the US field hospital units used from the Korean War to the Gulf War?

Mobile was the point: a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital followed the front, and in Korea a seriously wounded soldier who made it to one had a better than 97% chance of survival.

Which American poet volunteered as a nurse in Washington's army hospitals during the Civil War?

Walt Whitman headed south after fearing his brother was on a casualty list from Fredericksburg. He then took part-time work in the paymaster's office to leave time for the wards.

Which word for noisy chaos comes from the old nickname of London's Bethlem Royal Hospital?

Bedlam was how Londoners pronounced Bethlehem, the name of a priory founded in 1247 that was caring for the mentally ill by the early 1400s.

The word quarantine comes from the dialect of which Italian port, where ships waited forty days before landing?

Venice kept ships from plague-stricken ports waiting offshore to be sure no hidden cases were aboard, and quarantena, Venetian for forty days, named the practice.

Which soft drink was invented in 1886 by pharmacist John Pemberton and first sold as a patent medicine?

Coca-Cola grew out of Pemberton's hunt for a painkiller to replace the morphine he depended on after a wartime sabre wound. He promoted the result as a tonic for headaches and exhaustion.

Which country's Royal Flying Doctor Service was founded in 1928 by Presbyterian minister John Flynn?

Australia's service began as a one-year experiment flying out of Cloncurry, Queensland. It grew into the world's first comprehensive civilian aeromedical service.

Which Renaissance artist's name was given to the robotic surgery system cleared by the US FDA in 2000?

Leonardo da Vinci was chosen partly because his anatomy studies led to the design of the first known robot. A surgeon steers the machine's arms from a console beside the operating table.

Mary Mallon, the symptom-free carrier nicknamed Typhoid Mary, infected New York households while working as what?

A cook was the riskiest job a carrier could hold. Freed in 1910 on a promise to give up kitchens, she was caught in 1915 after cooking at a maternity hospital as 'Mary Brown'.

Which health profession's name comes from Middle English words meaning 'with woman'?

Midwife describes the helper, not the mother: mid meant 'with' and wif meant 'woman', so she is the woman who stays with the mother at the birth.

Florence Nightingale, famed for her rose diagrams of army deaths, was a pioneer in which mathematical field?

Statistics made her the first woman elected to what is now the Royal Statistical Society. She designed her charts for MPs and civil servants who were unlikely to read a table of figures.

Which Nobel-winning scientist equipped vans with X-ray machines to serve field hospitals in the First World War?

Marie Curie studied anatomy and car mechanics so she could equip the vehicles herself, and they became known as 'Little Curies'. She wanted surgeons to stop amputating limbs that could be saved.

Surgeon William Halsted asked which rubber company to make gloves that protected his scrub nurse's hands?

Goodyear made them for Caroline Hampton, whose hands reacted to the antiseptics used in theatre. The gloves turned out to make operations far cleaner, and she later married Halsted.

Which Canadian politician, known as the father of Medicare, was voted the Greatest Canadian by CBC viewers in 2004?

Tommy Douglas moved Saskatchewan toward universal coverage as premier, though the full plan launched in 1962 under his successor. Actor Kiefer Sutherland is his grandson.

British nurse Edith Cavell was shot in 1915 for helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape which occupied country?

Belgium was where she had built up a nursing school and treated the wounded of both sides. A German firing squad carried out the sentence despite international pressure for mercy.

Which medieval military order grew out of a Jerusalem infirmary for pilgrims and later ruled Malta?

Knights Hospitaller trace back to a hospital that merchants from Amalfi founded for sick and injured pilgrims. After the Holy Land was lost the order ruled Rhodes, then Malta until 1798.

Which American surgeon organised large-scale blood banks early in the Second World War, shipping plasma to Britain?

Charles Drew had found that plasma separated from the cells keeps about two months longer than whole blood. That made it practical to collect in America and ship across the Atlantic.

The US Navy hospital ship Mercy, which carries 1,000 beds, was converted in the 1980s from which type of vessel?

An oil tanker supplied the hull: Mercy was built in San Diego in 1976 as the SS Worth. The conversion took 35 months and cost $208 million.

Which branch of medicine did Andrew Taylor Still found, opening its first school in Kirksville, Missouri?

Osteopathy grew from Still's belief that the medicine of his day often caused significant harm. Graduates of American osteopathic schools earn a DO degree and are licensed as physicians.

The physician assistant profession began in 1965 when which university trained a class of former Navy hospital corpsmen?

Duke physician Eugene Stead based the course on the fast-track training of doctors during the Second World War. The first class graduated in 1967.

Which healthcare worker's job title combines Greek words meaning 'vein' and 'cutting'?

Phlebotomist is the title of the specialist who draws blood samples, usually from a vein in the arm or hand, though nurses and doctors can do the job too.

Which member of the surgical team runs the heart-lung machine that keeps oxygen flowing during open-heart operations?

Perfusionist is the title: during bypass the specialist keeps blood moving to the body's tissues and regulates its levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

Which health professional, once called a chiropodist, treats disorders of the foot and ankle?

Podiatrist replaced the older title, which is regarded as antiquated in the United States. American podiatrists hold a DPM degree and commonly perform foot and ankle surgery.

Which term did Robert Wachter and Lee Goldman coin in 1996 for doctors who treat only admitted inpatients?

Hospitalist first appeared in a New England Journal of Medicine article. The role is often likened to a quarterback, coordinating a patient's care for the length of the stay.

The World Health Organization's flag shows a staff entwined by one snake, the emblem of which Greek god?

Asclepius carried the single-snake rod. The winged staff with two snakes, often used in its place in the United States, belonged to Hermes, patron of commerce.

Which term for a dummy treatment comes from the Latin for 'I shall be pleasing'?

Placebo has an evil twin, the nocebo, from the Latin for 'I shall harm': an inactive treatment that leaves people feeling worse because they expect it to.

Which animal names the method, developed in Bogotá, of holding premature infants against a parent's bare chest?

Kangaroo care was devised as an answer to scarce and inadequate incubators. A parent's steady body heat turned out to regulate an infant's temperature more smoothly than the machine.

Which Founding Father helped found Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751 to treat the sick poor free of charge?

Benjamin Franklin won the money through a matching grant tied to donations from Philadelphians. He later wrote that no political manoeuvre had given him more pleasure.

Which southern Italian city was home to the Schola Medica, regarded as medieval Europe's first medical school?

Salerno's school was founded in the 9th century, and its practitioners, both men and women, were unrivalled in the western Mediterranean for practical medicine.

Which British Army surgeon, famed for a caesarean in Cape Town, was found after death to have been born female?

James Barry lived his whole adult life as a man after earning an Edinburgh medical degree. In the Cape Town operation both mother and child survived, a first recorded for a European in Africa.

Bernard Fantus, whose daughter suggested the name, opened America's first hospital blood bank in which Midwestern city?

Chicago's county hospital housed the store of donated blood, opened while Fantus directed its therapeutics department. He embraced his daughter Ruth's term because everyone knew how a bank works.

The Red Crescent emblem was first used by aid volunteers in an 1870s war between Russia and which empire?

The Ottoman Empire had argued that the cross took its roots from Christianity. Its own aid society, founded in 1868, was the forerunner of the Turkish Red Crescent.

Frank Pantridge fitted his first portable defibrillator, powered by car batteries, to an ambulance in which city?

Belfast got the 70 kg prototype in 1965. Within three years he had cut the weight to 3 kg, using a miniature capacitor manufactured for NASA.

Which reformer's lobbying created America's first generation of mental asylums before she led the Union's army nurses?

Dorothea Dix began with a statewide investigation in New England of care for the mentally ill poor, then carried the campaign to other legislatures and to Congress.

Nurse Mary Seacole, who ran the British Hotel for sick officers in the 1850s, was born in which Caribbean colony?

Jamaica posthumously awarded her its Order of Merit. Her mother kept a boarding house in Kingston and was a 'doctress' skilled in herbal remedies.

Which New York institution, begun as an almshouse in 1736, is the oldest public hospital in the United States?

Bellevue went on to open the nation's first nursing school on Florence Nightingale's principles, its first children's clinic and its first emergency pavilion, all in the 1870s.

Which nurse founded New York's Henry Street Settlement and coined the term 'public health nurse'?

Lillian Wald also campaigned to put nurses in public schools. She served as first president of the National Organization for Public Health Nursing.

Which Renaissance physician, called the father of toxicology, argued that only the dose makes a substance poisonous?

Paracelsus reasoned that materials poisonous in large doses may be curative in small ones. He also urged doctors to trust observation alongside the wisdom handed down to them.

Which 16th-century surgeon stopped pouring boiling oil on soldiers' wounds after a turpentine ointment worked better?

Ambroise Paré returned the following morning to find the soldiers given boiling oil in agony and those given the ointment recovering. He avoided cauterising wounds from then on.

Freedom House, the first US ambulance service staffed by paramedics, began in 1967 in which city's Hill District?

Pittsburgh's first crews were 25 Black men recruited from the neighbourhood, some after long unemployment. Their training and ambulance design set the standard for emergency care nationally.