198 Fun Facts About Medical

Which emblem, often confused with the caduceus, is the true symbol of medicine?

The Rod of Asclepius, one snake on a staff, belongs to the Greek god of healing; the winged caduceus spread through American medicine after the US Army Medical Corps adopted it in 1902.

The caduceus, wrongly used as a medical symbol, is traditionally the symbol of which god?

Hermes, messenger of the gods, carried the caduceus as a herald's staff, so to Greeks and Romans it was the badge of envoys and commerce rather than of healing.

Where in Greece was Hippocrates born?

Kos was Hippocrates' birthplace around 460 BCE; little else about his life is certain, and the legends about him were already growing in ancient times.

Which maxim is wrongly credited to the Hippocratic Oath?

First, do no harm appears nowhere in the Hippocratic Oath; the nearest line, 'to do good or to do no harm', comes from another Hippocratic work, the Epidemics.

What does the Latin word 'placebo' mean?

'I shall be pleasing' is the Latin sense of placebo; in the 1700s doctors began using the word for prescriptions written solely to please a patient, and to 'sing placebo' had long meant to flatter.

What is an inert treatment called when the patient expects it to do harm?

Nocebo, Latin for 'I shall be harmful', explains why people given dummy injections in vaccine trials still report headaches and fatigue: expecting side effects can produce them.

Aspirin's precursor salicin comes from the bark of which tree?

Willow bark's fever-easing power was first reported in 1763, when Oxfordshire vicar Edward Stone sent the Royal Society the results of five years of trials with the dried, powdered bark.

Which company was selling Aspirin globally by 1899?

Bayer coined the name Aspirin in 1899, taking 'A' from acetyl and 'spir' from Spiraea, the meadowsweet plant, which also yields the drug's parent compounds, and was soon selling it worldwide.

Children with viral infections are not given aspirin because of the risk of which condition?

Reye syndrome, a rare and often deadly childhood illness, nearly vanished once parents were warned off aspirin: US cases fell from 555 in 1980 to a handful a year by the mid-1990s.

Paracetamol is sold in the US under which brand name?

Tylenol, acetaminophen and paracetamol are all clipped from the same chemical name, N-acetyl-para-aminophenol; the US kept one contraction as its generic name and most other countries the other.

Ibuprofen was discovered in 1961 by researchers at which British company?

Boots the Chemists researcher Stewart Adams tried the new compound on his own hangover before giving a speech; ibuprofen went on sale in Britain in 1969 as Brufen.

Friedrich Sertürner named the opium alkaloid he isolated in 1804 after which Greek god?

Morphine takes its name from Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, for its sleep-inducing effect; Friedrich Sertürner isolated it from opium in 1804.

Statins lower cholesterol by inhibiting which enzyme?

HMG-CoA reductase drives the body's cholesterol production; Akira Endo found the first statin in a Penicillium mould in the 1970s after testing thousands of fungi for something that would block it.

Which blood thinner first went on sale in 1948 as a rat poison?

Warfarin is named for WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which funded its development as a rodent killer; it was approved for human patients in 1954.

Which US president was given a new blood thinner after a heart attack in office?

Dwight Eisenhower was prescribed the drug after his September 1955 heart attack, a year after its approval; studies in patients had begun once a US military recruit survived a deliberate overdose of it in 1951.

Which drug did Pfizer develop as an angina treatment before trial volunteers reported a surprising side effect?

Viagra's compound, sildenafil, did little for angina in early trials, but volunteers reported erections, so Pfizer switched targets and won approval for erectile dysfunction in 1998.

Which bacterium makes one of the deadliest toxins known, injected in tiny doses to smooth wrinkles?

Clostridium botulinum makes botulinum toxin, sold heavily diluted as Botox; its first approval, in 1989, was for crossed eyes and eyelid spasms, not wrinkles.

Botulism was first traced, in early-1800s Germany, to poisoning from which food?

Blood sausage and other smoked sausages caused the Württemberg outbreaks that doctor-poet Justinus Kerner studied; botulism takes its name from botulus, Latin for sausage.

Epinephrine, the fight-or-flight hormone, is produced mainly by which glands?

The adrenal glands release epinephrine, also called adrenaline, under stress; a shot of the same hormone from an auto-injector such as an EpiPen is the emergency treatment for a severe allergic reaction.

Penicillin was so scarce in 1941 that doctors recovered it from which bodily fluid of treated patients?

Urine carries most of a penicillin dose out of the body within hours, so the Oxford team extracted the drug from the urine of their first patient, policeman Albert Alexander, to use it again.

The word insulin comes from the Latin for what?

Insulin comes from the Latin insula, 'island', because it is secreted by the islets of Langerhans, tiny clusters of hormone-making cells.

Which first-line diabetes drug descends from goat's rue, a plant long used in European folk medicine?

Metformin descends from guanidine compounds in goat's rue; French physician Jean Sterne first used it for diabetes in 1957, yet it was overlooked for decades in favour of stronger, riskier relatives.

Which now-everyday medical word did soil microbiologist Selman Waksman introduce in the early 1940s?

Antibiotic was the word Waksman introduced for substances that microbes make to kill other microbes; his team sifted thousands of soil microbes before finding streptomycin, the first antibiotic to beat tuberculosis.

Which ambassador's wife brought smallpox inoculation from Turkey to Britain in 1721?

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu saw the practice while living at the British embassy in Constantinople, and in 1721 had her daughter inoculated in London, the first such operation in England.

Which form of diabetes is the most common?

Type 2 diabetes makes up the great majority of cases; unlike type 1, an autoimmune loss of insulin-making cells, it can often be prevented or delayed by diet, exercise and keeping a healthy weight.

The word 'asthma' comes from a Greek word meaning what?

Panting is what the Greek ásthma meant, from a verb for breathing hard; medieval English wrote it 'asma', and the Greek spelling was later restored, leaving a 'th' that is not pronounced.

Which common condition is nicknamed 'the silent killer' because it rarely causes symptoms?

Hypertension is called the silent killer because it usually causes no symptoms until it harms the heart or brain; by the WHO's count, nearly half of the adults who have it do not know.

What is the most common cause of a heart attack?

Rupture of an atherosclerotic plaque in a coronary artery triggers a clot that blocks blood flow, which is why emergency advice is to take an aspirin, which slows clotting, while waiting for help.

What is a stroke whose symptoms last less than 24 hours called?

A transient ischemic attack, or mini-stroke, is a brief blockage of blood flow to the brain; it is treated as an emergency because it warns that a full stroke may follow soon.

The disease name 'cancer' is the Latin word for which animal?

Crab is the meaning of both the Latin cancer and the earlier Greek karkinos: ancient doctors thought a tumour's swollen veins spread out like a crab's legs.

Tuberculosis was historically known by which name?

Consumption was the old name for tuberculosis because the disease seemed to consume its victims, who wasted away as it advanced.

Which vaccine protects against tuberculosis?

BCG stands for bacillus Calmette-Guérin, after two French researchers who spent 13 years, from 1908 to 1921, weakening a cattle tuberculosis strain until it was safe to give to people.

Malaria is spread by the bite of which mosquito genus?

Anopheles mosquitoes carry malaria; only infected females, which need blood to make eggs, transmit the Plasmodium parasites.

Which plant extract was the main malaria drug for three centuries?

Quinine comes from the bark of a South American tree; Jesuit missionaries were using it against fevers by the 1630s, which is why Europeans long called it Jesuit's bark.

AIDS was first recognised by which agency in 1981?

The US Centers for Disease Control first reported the syndrome on 5 June 1981, describing Pneumocystis pneumonia in five previously healthy young men in Los Angeles.

Most flu vaccines are grown inside what?

Hens' eggs have been used to grow flu vaccine virus for more than 70 years, since the first shots were developed with the US Army in the 1940s; even so, the vaccines are considered safe for people with egg allergy.

Koplik spots, tiny white marks inside the cheeks, are an early warning sign of which infection?

Measles shows Koplik spots two to three days before its rash, a sign American paediatrician Henry Koplik described in 1896 that lets doctors isolate a patient before the most infectious stage.

As of 2023, wild poliovirus remained endemic in only Afghanistan and which other country?

Pakistan and Afghanistan were the last two countries with endemic wild poliovirus in 2023; the WHO warns that failing to stop it there could let polio resurge around the world.

Albert Sabin's polio vaccine was easier to give than Jonas Salk's because it was taken how?

By mouth: Sabin's live, weakened virus was swallowed rather than injected, and it multiplies in the gut, building immunity at the very place wild poliovirus enters the body.

Louis Pasteur's vaccine, first given to a nine-year-old boy in 1885, protected against which disease?

Rabies seemed certain for Joseph Meister after a rabid dog mauled him; Pasteur, a chemist rather than a physician, agreed with some reluctance to treat him, and the boy survived.

Tetanus is also commonly known as what?

Lockjaw is the common name for tetanus because spasm of the jaw muscles is often the first sign; 'tetanus' itself comes from the Greek for stretched or taut.

What is the fixed, grin-like facial spasm of tetanus called?

Risus sardonicus, Latin for 'sardonic laugh', is tetanus's fixed grin: the spasm lifts the eyebrows and stretches the mouth, so a patient in painful spasm seems to smile.

Cholera can kill within hours chiefly by causing what?

Severe dehydration from torrential watery diarrhoea is what kills, so the cure is strikingly simple: promptly replacing lost water and salts cuts cholera's death rate from about half to under 1%.

Leprosy's modern name honours which doctor, who identified its bacterium in 1873?

Gerhard Hansen, a Norwegian physician, found the bacterium, so leprosy is formally Hansen's disease; despite the stigma it has long carried, it is curable and does not spread through casual contact.

Which animal is used in laboratories to grow the leprosy bacterium?

Armadillo: the nine-banded species is one of the few animals besides humans that catches leprosy, and because the bacterium cannot be grown in a lab dish, researchers raise it in them.

Scurvy is caused by a lack of what?

Vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy because the human body cannot make the vitamin itself; its chemical name, ascorbic acid, was coined to mean 'anti-scurvy'.

James Lind's 1747 scurvy experiment is remembered as one of the first what?

Controlled clinical trials trace back to James Lind, who in 1747 split twelve scurvy-stricken sailors aboard HMS Salisbury into six pairs and gave each pair a different remedy to compare.

Rickets is usually caused by a lack of what?

Vitamin D deficiency, often from too little sunlight, causes rickets by impairing calcium absorption, so children's growing bones soften and bow.

Gout results from needle-shaped crystals of which substance in the joints?

Uric acid crystallises most readily in the cooler parts of the body, which may be why gout's needle-sharp crystals so often strike first in the big toe.

Gout was historically nicknamed the disease of whom?

Kings and other wealthy diners could afford the meat, seafood and alcohol linked to gout's attacks, so it was also known as the rich man's disease.

Pertussis is also known by what name because of how long its symptoms can last?

The 100-day cough is so called because pertussis's coughing fits can drag on for ten weeks or more; its commoner name, whooping cough, comes from the gasp for air after each fit.

Chickenpox is caused by which pathogen?

Varicella zoster virus, a herpesvirus, causes chickenpox; it then lies dormant in nerve roots and can reactivate decades later as shingles.

Rubella is usually mild, but infection is most harmful during what?

Pregnancy, above all its first weeks, is the danger: the virus reaches the fetus in up to 90% of cases and can cause deafness, eye defects and heart disease, a link the doctor Norman Gregg spotted in 1941.

Which Ebola outbreak was the first to exceed 10,000 deaths?

The Western Africa epidemic of 2013 to 2016 killed about 11,300 people, more than every other Ebola outbreak combined, after the virus reached the capital cities of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

What does the '19' in COVID-19 refer to?

The year 2019, when the first cases appeared, gives the name its number: COVID-19 is short for 'coronavirus disease 2019', a label the WHO chose in February 2020 under guidelines that keep place names out of diseases.

Which infection-triggered condition was linked to one in five deaths worldwide in 2017?

Sepsis kills when the body's own response to an infection starts damaging its organs; a Lancet study published in 2020 tied it to 11 million deaths in 2017, about one in five worldwide.

What is the most common blood disorder worldwide?

Anaemia, a shortage of red blood cells or haemoglobin, affects about a quarter of humanity; iron deficiency is its leading cause, and young children and women of childbearing age are hit hardest.

Which inherited blood disorder did Queen Victoria pass on to several of Europe's royal families?

Haemophilia passed from Queen Victoria, a carrier, to royal houses across Europe, most famously Russia's; DNA from the Romanovs' remains later showed it was the rarer type B.

Carrying one copy of which blood disorder's gene protects against malaria?

Sickle cell disease needs two copies of the gene, but carriers of one copy resist severe malaria, so the trait spread where malaria is rife; nearly 80% of cases are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Besides genetic testing, how is cystic fibrosis diagnosed?

A sweat test works because the faulty CFTR protein leaves sweat abnormally salty, so a high chloride reading points to cystic fibrosis; parents sometimes notice a salty taste when kissing their child.

Down syndrome is also known as trisomy of which chromosome?

Chromosome 21 in triplicate, called trisomy 21, causes Down syndrome; the extra copy usually arises by chance when an egg or sperm forms, and the odds rise with the mother's age.

Parkinson's disease involves loss of dopamine-producing neurons in which brain region?

Substantia nigra is Latin for 'black substance': its dopamine-making neurons are dark with pigment, and it is the loss of these cells that brings on the tremor and stiffness of Parkinson's disease.

In multiple sclerosis, the immune system attacks which part of the nervous system?

The myelin sheath is the fatty insulation around nerve fibres; where it is stripped away, scar-like patches form, and those many scars, or scleroses, give multiple sclerosis its name.

The word 'epilepsy' comes from a Greek word meaning what?

To seize is the sense of the Greek epilambanein, 'to take hold of'; the Greeks called epilepsy the sacred disease, though a Hippocratic treatise insisted its causes were natural.

What is the flashing-light warning before some migraines called?

Aura affects only about a quarter to a third of migraine sufferers and usually fades within an hour; it is thought to come from a wave of altered nerve activity spreading across the brain's surface.

What did Karl Landsteiner originally call the blood group now known as O?

C was Landsteiner's label for the third group he found in 1901, after A and B; it was later renamed O because its red cells carry neither the A nor the B marker.

What is the gap between systolic and diastolic blood pressure called?

Pulse pressure is about 40 mmHg at a healthy 120/80; it widens as arteries stiffen with age, and a persistently wide gap is a warning sign for heart disease.

Which instrument did René Laennec improvise in 1816 from a rolled-up sheet of paper?

Stethoscope: examining a young woman with heart trouble, Laennec rolled paper into a tube rather than press his ear to her chest, heard her heart clearly, and went on to build a wooden version.

What is the inflatable-cuff instrument used to measure blood pressure called?

Sphygmomanometer cuffs date from 1896, when the physician Scipione Riva-Rocci wrapped an inflatable band round the arm, making blood pressure simple to measure at the bedside.

Which Bee Gees hit do first-aid trainers recommend for keeping time during CPR chest compressions?

Stayin' Alive has a beat that falls inside the 100 to 120 compressions a minute that CPR guidelines call for, so rescuers are told to push in time with it.

Which heart device was first implanted in a patient in Stockholm in 1958?

Pacemaker patient number one, Swedish engineer Arne Larsson, received his from surgeon Åke Senning in 1958 and, on a succession of replacements, lived another 43 years to the age of 86.

Why did Röntgen put an 'X' in the name of his 1895 discovery?

Röntgen chose X to signify an unknown type of ray, as x stands for an unknown in mathematics; in German and many other languages they are named Röntgen rays after him.

Godfrey Hounsfield built the first CT scanner in the early 1970s at which British company, better known for its records?

EMI, the Beatles' record company, employed Hounsfield as an electrical engineer; he shared the 1979 Nobel Prize with physicist Allan Cormack, who had worked out the mathematics independently.

Adolf Kussmaul pioneered endoscopy in 1868 after being inspired by which performers?

Sword swallowers showed Kussmaul that a rigid tube could pass down the throat without gagging; in 1868 he slid one, lit by mirrors and a lamp, into a sword swallower's gullet.

Which organ is the second most commonly transplanted worldwide?

Liver transplants rank second worldwide, well ahead of hearts; because the organ regrows, a living donor can give part of theirs and both portions return to normal size.

Which physician-poet suggested the word 'anesthesia' to William Morton after his 1846 ether demonstration?

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. proposed 'anaesthesia', Greek for insensibility, in a letter to Morton that began, 'Everybody wants to have a hand in a great discovery.'

Which chemist discovered laughing gas's giddy effects by inhaling it in 1799?

Humphry Davy breathed the gas at Bristol's Pneumatic Institution and offered it to friends, among them the poet Robert Southey; before long, laughing gas parties were in fashion.

John Snow, who traced cholera to a London pump, gave Queen Victoria which drug in childbirth?

Chloroform: Snow, who had made it safer by working out precise doses, gave it to the Queen at the births of Prince Leopold in 1853 and Princess Beatrice in 1857.

Swiss pig gelder Jacob Nufer is said to have performed which operation on his own wife in 1500?

Caesarean section: in a tale first written down 82 years later, Nufer operated after thirteen midwives had failed, and his wife is said to have gone on to bear five more children.

Which Greek physician of the Roman Empire called all tumours onkos, the root of 'oncology'?

Galen used onkos, Greek for 'swelling', for tumours of every kind; his authority was such that his writings dominated European medicine until the 17th century.

The word 'pediatrics' comes from Greek words meaning what?

Healer of children: the Greek pais (child) and iatros (doctor) name a field built on the adage that children are not 'little adults', because immature bodies react differently to illness and to drugs.

The word 'psychiatry' literally means the medical treatment of what?

The soul is psyche in Greek, literally breath, a word that came to cover spirit and mind as well, which is why psychology and psychiatry both begin with it.

Otorhinolaryngology is the formal name for the medical specialty usually known by which abbreviation?

ENT, for ear, nose and throat, is one specialty because the three form a connected system: the Eustachian tube links the middle ear to the back of the nose and throat.

Podiatry is the branch of medicine devoted to which part of the body?

The foot, ankle and lower limb once came under 'chiropody': Abraham Lincoln's chiropodist, Isachar Zacharie, treated the president's feet and was also sent on confidential missions to Confederate leaders.

Nephrology is the study of which organ?

Kidney failure became survivable thanks to the Dutch doctor Willem Kolff, who built a dialysis machine in wartime from cellophane tubing wound round a drum and saved his first patient with it in 1945.

Hepatology deals with the liver, gallbladder, biliary tree and which other organ?

Pancreas: its main duct joins the bile duct just before the gut, so a stone slipping out of the gallbladder can block both and set off a sudden, painful inflammation of the pancreas.

Which inherited disorder is known as brittle bone disease?

Osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease, is an inherited defect of type I collagen that makes bones fracture easily; many affected people have blue-tinged whites of the eyes.

Rheumatology takes its name from a Greek word meaning what?

Flowing current is the sense of the Greek rheuma: doctors long blamed aching joints on rheum, a watery humour, flowing into them, and the name outlived the theory.

'Immunity' comes from the Latin immunis, meaning what?

Exempt: a Roman who was immunis owed no taxes, military service or other public duties, and medicine later borrowed the word for a body that an infection cannot touch.

Epidemiology literally means the study of what?

That which is upon the people is the literal Greek (epi, upon; demos, people); the field outgrew infections when a 1950s study of British doctors tied smoking to lung cancer.

In which city is the World Health Organization, founded in 1948, headquartered?

Geneva is home to the WHO, whose founding date, 7 April, is kept as World Health Day; its vaccination campaign wiped out smallpox, which was declared eradicated in 1980.

Which humanitarian organisation won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1917, 1944 and 1963?

The Red Cross committee won in 1917 for its efforts to care for wounded soldiers and prisoners of war and their families, and in 1944 for its work through the Second World War.

Médecins Sans Frontières was founded in 1971 in the aftermath of which crisis?

The Biafran famine of 1967–70 shocked the young French doctors sent to work in it, and in Paris in 1971 they and a group of journalists founded MSF to take aid across any border and speak out about what they saw.

Freedom House, a Pittsburgh ambulance service launched in 1967, was the first in the United States staffed by whom?

Trained paramedics were a new idea: the sick had usually reached hospital in a police van or a funeral home's car, so Freedom House recruited Black men from the city's Hill District and schooled them in emergency care.

The first recorded ambulances, bedded wagons for the wounded, served which monarch's army at a siege in 1487?

Isabella of Castile sent the wagons to the siege of Málaga, but the wounded were collected only once the fighting had stopped, so many still died where they fell.

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

A stranger or guest is whom the first hospitals took in: medieval ones were lodgings for pilgrims and travellers as much as for the sick, which is why hospital and hostel share a root.

In which Minnesota city did William Worrall Mayo settle in 1864, founding what became the Mayo Clinic?

William Worrall Mayo settled in Rochester, Minnesota, in 1864 as a Civil War examining surgeon; his sons Will and Charlie built the group practice into the Mayo Clinic.

Johns Hopkins Hospital, opened in 1889, is considered the birthplace of which medical traditions?

Johns Hopkins Hospital is credited as the birthplace of rounds, residents and house staff, the training model William Osler built there; its founder's $7 million bequest was then the largest in US history.

Which author donated the copyright of his most famous work to Great Ormond Street Hospital?

J. M. Barrie gave the hospital the rights to Peter Pan in 1929 and asked that the sums never be revealed; when the copyright ran out, Parliament granted it a lasting right to royalties in the UK.

Britain's National Health Service was launched in 1948 at Park Hospital, now Trafford General, on the edge of which city?

Manchester: the health minister came to Park Hospital in suburban Davyhulme on 5 July 1948 and was ceremonially handed its keys, opening a service that was free at the point of use.

Whom did Clement Attlee appoint Health Minister in 1945 to build the NHS?

Aneurin Bevan, Attlee's Minister of Health from 1945, steered the National Health Service Act through Parliament in 1946 and launched the service on 5 July 1948, free at the point of use.

Medieval Europe's first medical school, home to the woman physician Trota, grew up in which southern Italian port?

Salerno's school entered its great age in 1077, when Constantine the African arrived and began turning Arabic medical books into Latin for Europe's doctors.

The prescription symbol Rx comes from the Latin word recipe, meaning what?

Recipe is the Latin imperative 'take' ('take thou'), which headed medieval prescriptions listing ingredients to be compounded; the symbol Rx abbreviates it.

On the WHO's adult scale, which category starts at a body mass index of 30?

Obese on this scale starts at 30, yet the formula came from Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer who was charting the 'average man' in the 1830s, not weighing patients.

What does alcohol do to a hypothermia victim's body heat?

Faster loss, though the drinker feels warmer: alcohol widens blood vessels near the surface, so heat escapes, and first aiders never give it. Hypothermia is a core temperature below 35 °C.

Cholesterol, whose name means 'solid bile', was first identified in the 18th century in what?

Gallstones gave up the waxy solid to the French doctor François Poulletier de la Salle; its bad name dates from 1913, when Nikolai Anichkov fed it to rabbits and their arteries furred up.

The most common type of stone formed in the urinary tract is made of what?

Calcium oxalate forms when oxalate, plentiful in spinach, rhubarb and nuts, binds with calcium, which is why drinking plenty of water, to dilute both, is the best protection against stones.

The word 'hernia' is borrowed directly from Latin, in which it means what?

Rupture is the Latin sense, though usually tissue just pushes through a weak spot; men get most groin hernias, perhaps because the canal that let the testicles descend leaves a wider opening.

Which organ, pierced by a pin, did Claudius Amyand remove from an 11-year-old boy in 1735?

Appendix: Amyand found it lying inside the boy's groin hernia at St George's Hospital in London and cut it out, and an appendix trapped in a hernia still carries his name.

The Roman writer Celsus described which operation as early as AD 50?

Tonsillectomy in Celsus's account began with a finger worked round the tonsil to free it; only if that failed was it caught with a hook and cut away.

The first cancer chemotherapy drugs, the alkylating agents, were derived from what?

Mustard gas used in World War I was the starting point: two Yale pharmacologists studying such weapons in the 1940s altered it into nitrogen mustard and tried it on a cancer patient.

Diazepam, patented by Hoffmann-La Roche in 1959, is better known by which brand name?

Valium reached pharmacies in 1963 as an improved version of Roche's Librium and was America's best-selling medicine all through the 1970s, which turned the Swiss firm into an industry giant.

Australian psychiatrist John Cade showed in 1949 that salts of which metal could calm mania?

Lithium first calmed Cade's guinea pigs, which he had been injecting with samples from manic patients in search of a toxin; he then swallowed it himself to check it was safe before giving it to patients.

The antidepressant fluoxetine is best known by which brand name?

Prozac grew out of antihistamines: Eli Lilly researcher Bryan Molloy knew such drugs had led to the first antidepressants, so he built compounds that resembled them in search of one with fewer side effects.

The first Nobel Prize in Medicine, in 1901, honoured Emil von Behring's serum therapy against which childhood killer?

Diphtheria serum grew from an 1890 paper Behring wrote with Kitasato Shibasaburō, who had done much of the bench work; Kitasato was nominated in 1901 too but went unrewarded.

Gerty Cori, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine, shared her 1947 award with which relative?

Her husband, Carl, was offered posts by universities that refused to hire her, and at Washington University she earned a tenth of his salary, becoming a full professor only months before the prize.

Who created the first modern hospice, in 1967?

Dame Cicely Saunders, first a nurse and later a doctor, founded St Christopher's in London after a dying patient she loved, David Tasma, left her £500 to be 'a window in your home'.

The word 'triage' comes from a French verb meaning what?

Triage comes from the French trier, 'to sort'; Napoleon's surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey applied sorting by urgency to battlefield casualties in the early 1800s.

Which newborn check is named after the anesthesiologist who devised it in 1952?

The Apgar score carries Virginia Apgar's surname, not an acronym: the memory aid Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration was fitted to its letters about a decade later.

What does the highest Glasgow Coma Scale score indicate?

Full alertness earns 15 and the deepest coma scores 3, never 0; its two inventors published the scale in 1974 so that staff could describe a head-injured patient's state in the same terms.

The letters on an eye chart are formally known as what?

Optotypes need not be letters: for small children and others who cannot read the alphabet, charts use a letter E turned in different directions, and the patient points the way its arms face.

Louis Braille developed his code in 1824 as an improvement on what?

Night writing was Charles Barbier's code of raised dots, up to twelve to a cell and standing for sounds; the teenage Braille halved the cell to six dots, small enough to read with one fingertip.

Engineers Harry Jennings and Herbert Everest transformed the wheelchair in 1933 with a light steel model that could do what?

Fold up it did: Everest, disabled in a mining accident, had complained about bulky chairs, so the pair built a collapsible one in Jennings's garage and became the first to mass-produce wheelchairs.

The first electric hearing aids of the 1890s borrowed their key component from which recent invention?

The telephone's carbon microphone turned faint sound into a stronger electric signal, so Miller Reese Hutchison built one into his Akouphone, made for a friend deafened by scarlet fever.

Adolf Fick's contact lenses of 1888, the first to be fitted successfully, were made of what?

Glass shells this large and unwieldy could be worn for only a couple of hours at a time; Fick tried them on rabbits, then on himself, then on a few volunteers.

In which present-day country were the first wearable spectacles made, in the late 13th century?

Italy is where a friar preaching in 1306 said the art of making eyeglasses was 'not yet twenty years' old, which is how historians date the invention to the 1280s.

Earle Dickson invented the Band-Aid in 1920 for whom?

His wife, who kept cutting herself cooking, could not dress her own fingers, so Dickson laid small squares of gauze along a strip of surgical tape for her; Johnson & Johnson later made him a vice president.

Which is the smallest and lightest bone in the human body?

The stapes, Latin for stirrup, passes the eardrum's vibrations to the inner ear; the three ear bones work as levers that concentrate the force enough to move the fluid inside.

Which is the longest bone in the human body?

The femur makes up about a quarter of a person's height in men and women alike, a ratio steady enough that forensic experts estimate how tall someone stood from a single thigh bone.

Which is the largest organ of the human body?

Skin, some 1.5 to 2 square metres of it in an adult, is a waterproof wrap that keeps water in and germs out, which is why large burns bring fluid loss and infection.

A resting adult heart rate above 100 beats per minute is known by which term?

Tachycardia is the fast side of the normal 60 to 100 range; its slow opposite, bradycardia, can be a sign of fitness, as endurance athletes often rest at 40 to 60 beats a minute.

Why is the human left lung smaller than the right?

It makes room for the heart, which leaves a dent called the cardiac notch; an inhaled object usually ends up in the right lung, whose main airway is wider and runs straighter down.

Which part of the eye supplies most of its focusing power?

The cornea does most of the bending because light meets it straight from the air; water is optically almost the same as the cornea, so underwater that power vanishes and swimmers see a blur.

Which people have the highest rate of twinning in the world?

The Yoruba of southwest Nigeria have the world's highest twinning rate, about 45 twin births per 1,000; a yam-rich diet containing phytoestrogens is one suggested cause.

Why did IVF pioneer Patrick Steptoe miss the 2010 Nobel Prize?

His death in 1988 ruled him out, because Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously; the same rule excluded Jean Purdy, the nurse who was first to see the embryo's cells dividing.

Enovid, approved in the US in 1960, was the first of which kind of drug?

The birth-control pill had already been on sale for three years as a treatment for menstrual disorders before the 1960 ruling approved it as a contraceptive.

Kangaroo care, devised in Bogotá for premature babies, relies on what?

Skin-to-skin contact with a caregiver worked so well that in 2022 the WHO advised starting it straight after birth for babies born before 37 weeks or weighing under 2.5 kg.

The Pap smear, named after the Greek-born doctor Georgios Papanikolaou, screens for which cancer?

Cervical cancer screening grew out of smears Papanikolaou studied at Cornell, many given by his wife Andromachi over 21 years; his 1928 report that they could reveal cancer cells drew little interest until the 1940s.

As of 2022, which country had the world's highest rate of melanoma?

Australia recorded about 37 new melanomas per 100,000 people in 2022, ahead of Denmark and Norway, as a largely fair-skinned population lives under intense ultraviolet light.

About nine in ten lymphomas are grouped under which name?

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a catch-all: the physician Hodgkin described one cancer of the lymph nodes in 1832, and every other lymphoma is filed under a name that says only what it is not.

The medical term 'metastasis' is Greek for what?

Displacement, a change of place, is what the Greek metastasis meant; doctors use it for cancer cells that travel to distant organs, the spread behind most cancer deaths.

'Malignancy' comes from Latin words meaning what?

Badly born is the literal Latin, male plus -gnus; a harmless growth gets the mirror-image word, benign or 'well born', which the Romans used of kind and generous people.

The word 'syndrome' derives from a Greek word meaning what?

Concurrence, literally a running together, fits symptoms that turn up as a set, cause known or not: AIDS was named a syndrome in 1982, the year before the virus behind it was found.

The word 'prognosis' comes from Greek for what?

Prognosis is Greek for 'fore-knowing', from pro (before) and gnosis (knowledge); Hippocratic writings urged physicians to foretell a disease's course.

Physicians adopted the white coat to represent themselves as what?

Physicians adopted the white coat in the late 1800s to present themselves as scientists, borrowing the laboratory's most recognisable garment and distancing medicine from quackery.

Where did Banting and Best isolate insulin in John Macleod's laboratory?

Banting and Best isolated insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921; Banting shared the 1923 Nobel Prize with Macleod and split his prize money with Best, who had been left out.

English physician William Harvey's 1628 treatise De Motu Cordis set out his discovery of what?

The circulation of the blood followed from Harvey's arithmetic: the heart pushes out far more blood in an hour than the whole body holds, so the same blood must keep coming back to it.

The words 'vaccine' and 'vaccination' come from Jenner's Latin term Variolae vaccinae, meaning what?

Pustules of the cow was Jenner's 1798 label for cowpox, built on vacca, Latin for cow; in 1881 Louis Pasteur proposed calling every protective inoculation a vaccine in Jenner's honour.

By what nickname is Ignaz Semmelweis, the pioneer of hand-washing in obstetrics, known?

Ignaz Semmelweis is remembered as 'the saviour of mothers': his 1847 rule of hand-washing in chlorinated lime cut childbed-fever deaths on his maternity ward from about 18% to around 1%, yet colleagues rejected him.

Where in London did Florence Nightingale establish her nursing school in 1860?

St Thomas' Hospital got the school in 1860, paid for from the Nightingale Fund, money the public had donated to honour her work in the Crimean War.

What is the title of Andreas Vesalius's landmark anatomy book of 1543?

De Humani Corporis Fabrica rested on Vesalius's own dissections of human bodies, which showed that the ancient authority doctors had trusted for some 1,300 years had described the anatomy of monkeys, not people.

Who, born in Oldham in July 1978, was the world's first baby conceived by IVF?

Louise Brown weighed 5 lb 12 oz; her sister Natalie, also an IVF baby, became in 1999 the first person conceived this way to give birth herself, and did so without it.

Semmelweis made his hand-washing discoveries at the First Obstetrical Clinic of which institution?

Vienna General Hospital had two maternity clinics, and mothers begged for the second, where deaths ran under 4% against about 10% in the first; that gap set Semmelweis hunting for the cause.

At which hospital did Joseph Lister introduce carbolic acid as a surgical steriliser?

Glasgow Royal Infirmary is where Joseph Lister brought in carbolic acid in 1865 after hearing it was used to treat sewage; he first succeeded with it on a boy's badly broken leg.

Which surgeon performed the first human-to-human heart transplant, in Cape Town in 1967?

Christiaan Barnard gave grocer Louis Washkansky the heart of a young accident victim; Washkansky woke and talked with his wife but died of pneumonia 18 days later, his defences lowered by anti-rejection drugs.

Which Persian polymath completed The Canon of Medicine in 1025?

Avicenna, or Ibn Sina, wrote a five-book encyclopedia that was put into Latin in the 12th century and stayed the standard teaching text in Europe's universities into early modern times.

In what did Alexander Fleming first find the germ-dissolving enzyme lysozyme, some years before penicillin?

His own nasal discharge, added to a culture plate, stopped the bacteria growing; he then found the same enzyme in tears, using lemons to make his colleagues cry enough to supply him.

Paul Lauterbur's 1973 invention, which he named 'zeugmatography', is known today by what name?

MRI scanning grew from one evening's idea: Lauterbur had watched tumours being measured in rats killed for the test, and saw a way to map the same signals from outside the body. His name for it used zeugma, Greek for a yoking.

Barry Marshall drank a broth of bacteria in 1984 hoping to show that germs, not stress, cause which condition?

Peptic ulcers were blamed on stress, spicy food and acid until Marshall and Robin Warren traced many of them to Helicobacter pylori, a finding that won the pair the 2005 Nobel Prize.

Which opioid was sold under its trademark name from 1898 as a supposedly non-addictive cough suppressant?

Heroin was a trademark for diamorphine, advertised as free of addictive side effects. It soon had one of the highest rates of addiction among its users.

Which Viennese doctor praised cocaine as a cure for many mental and physical problems in his 1884 paper 'On Coca'?

Sigmund Freud took the drug himself and gave it to a friend in chronic pain, who developed cocaine psychosis. After that he stopped recommending it in public.

Which tradesmen, joined in one London guild with surgeons in 1540, let blood, pulled teeth and amputated limbs?

Barbers owned razors and had steady hands, so surgery fell to them rather than to physicians. The red and white pole outside their shops is a relic of the bloodletting trade.

Which bitter compound from cinchona bark, long the standard malaria remedy, still gives tonic water its taste?

Quinine tonic was so bitter that, by tradition, the British in India mixed it with gin to get it down, creating the gin and tonic.

Which US president, paralysed from the waist down at 39, founded the charity that became the March of Dimes?

Franklin Roosevelt set it up in 1938 to fight polio, the illness he was diagnosed with in 1921. Eddie Cantor coined the name as a pun on the newsreel series The March of Time.

Which infection, usually caused by the Epstein–Barr virus, is nicknamed 'the kissing disease'?

Mononucleosis, also known as glandular fever, spreads mainly through saliva. Most people catch the virus as children, when it causes few or no symptoms.

Which disease, spread by the bite of rat fleas carrying Yersinia pestis, is the likely cause of the Black Death?

Bubonic plague is known for its buboes, painfully swollen lymph nodes in the armpits, groin and neck. The Black Death killed an estimated 25% to 60% of Europeans in the 14th century.

Hiccups are involuntary spasms of which muscle, each followed by the vocal cords snapping shut?

Diaphragm spasms are followed about 35 milliseconds later by the vocal cords closing, which makes the 'hic'. American Charles Osborne hiccupped for 68 years.

Which element did Switzerland begin adding to table salt in 1922, in the world's first food fortification programme?

Iodine feeds the thyroid gland, which swells into a goitre without it. Worldwide, a lack of it is the leading preventable cause of intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Which clouding of the eye's lens, cured by swapping in an artificial one, is the most common cause of blindness?

Cataracts cause up to 50% of blindness in lower-income regions but only about 5% in high-income countries, because the surgery is not readily available everywhere.

The MMR vaccine protects against measles, rubella and which infection that swells glands in front of the ears?

Mumps probably owes its name to that swelling, which changes the face and makes swallowing painful. Two doses of the vaccine protect about 88% of people against it.

Which form of dementia is named after the German psychiatrist who studied the brain of asylum patient Auguste Deter?

Alzheimer's disease was named by Emil Kraepelin, Alois Alzheimer's mentor. Alzheimer had paid for the rest of Deter's asylum stay in return for her records and brain after death.

Which first-aid technique of abdominal thrusts for a choking person is named after an American thoracic surgeon?

Heimlich maneuver's namesake also pushed it as a treatment for drowning and asthma attacks; his own institute later dropped the drowning advice.

Which French chemist had nine-year-old Joseph Meister given a rabies vaccine in 1885 after a rabid dog mauled him?

Louis Pasteur had the boy injected 13 times over 11 days and found him in good health three months later. Notebooks show two earlier patients had been treated first.

Which double Nobel laureate studied car mechanics to bring mobile X-ray units to First World War field hospitals?

Marie Curie's vans became known as 'petites Curies'. She saw that radiology near the front lines could spare soldiers amputations when their limbs could in fact be saved.

Which sedative promoted for morning sickness was withdrawn in Europe in 1961 after causing limb defects in babies?

Thalidomide was kept off the US market at the time by FDA reviewer Frances Kelsey, and the scandal led many countries to tighten their drug regulation.

Which tick-borne infection is named after a Connecticut town where a 1975 cluster was mistaken for childhood arthritis?

Lyme disease is the most common illness spread by ticks in the Northern Hemisphere. Its usual first sign is a red rash that expands from the bite about a week later.

Which tank-like ventilator, first used in 1928, enclosed most of a polio patient's body to keep them breathing?

Iron lung machines lower the air pressure around the chest so that it expands and draws air in. Philip Drinker and a colleague developed the device in 1927.

Which animal, used to drain blood after finger reattachment surgery, did the US FDA class as a medical device in 2004?

Leeches inject hirudin, a natural anticoagulant, as they feed, which keeps blood moving through reattached tissue. Their comeback in microsurgery began in the 1970s.

Which French doctor invented the stethoscope in 1816 after rolling paper into a tube to listen to a patient's heart?

René Laennec carved his own wooden flutes, a skill that led him to build the instrument. He found it far clearer than pressing an ear to the chest.

Who became the first woman to earn a US medical degree after male students voted to admit her as a joke?

Elizabeth Blackwell had been rejected by every other school she applied to. Geneva Medical College's 150 male students were told that a single objection would turn her away.

Which garden plant did William Withering identify as the active ingredient in a traditional herbal remedy for dropsy?

Foxglove gave medicine the heart drugs digitoxin and digoxin, but the gap between a useful dose and a fatal one is very narrow.

Which nerve, the largest in the human body unprotected by muscle or bone, causes the jolt of hitting your 'funny bone'?

Ulnar nerve jolts feel like an electric shock because a knock behind the elbow presses the nerve against the humerus, the bone of the upper arm.

Which Swiss businessman co-founded the Red Cross after witnessing the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in 1859?

Henry Dunant's book A Memory of Solferino called for a body to treat the wounded of war without discrimination. He went on to win the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.

Which opioid antagonist, sold as the nasal spray Narcan, can restore breathing within minutes of an overdose?

Naloxone starts working within about two minutes when given into a vein, but it blocks opioids for only 30 to 90 minutes.

Which scanning technique did Ian Donald adapt for pregnancy after seeing a boilermaker use it to find flaws in welds?

Ultrasound was already checking welds in industry. Donald, an obstetrician with a wartime interest in radar and sonar, built the first obstetric machine, the Diasonograph, in 1963.

Which disorder of faking illness did Richard Asher name in 1951 after a fictional baron who tells impossible tales?

Munchausen syndrome met objections from doctors who felt a comic literary name was disrespectful to patients. Its formal name is factitious disorder imposed on self.

Which discredited brain operation won its Portuguese originator, António Egas Moniz, a share of the 1949 Nobel Prize?

Lobotomy was championed in the United States by Walter Freeman, who performed the first one there in 1936. The arrival of antipsychotic medications brought its rapid decline.

Which infectious agents behind mad cow disease are misfolded proteins that contain no DNA or RNA at all?

Prions spread by making normal copies of the same protein misfold too. They are also the hypothesized cause of scrapie in sheep and chronic wasting disease in deer.

Which US Army doctor led the team confirming that mosquitoes carry yellow fever, clearing the way for the Panama Canal?

Walter Reed's team proved a theory first put forward by the Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay, that a mosquito rather than direct contact spreads the disease.

Which Swiss alchemist, credited as the 'father of toxicology', publicly burned a revered medical textbook in 1527?

Paracelsus burned a copy of the Canon of Medicine, a pillar of academic study, in a market square to show his contempt for conventional medicine.

Which Jamaican nurse opened the 'British Hotel' for sick and convalescent officers during the Crimean War?

Mary Seacole's British Hotel was really a restaurant. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1990 and voted the greatest Black Briton in 2004.

Which German doctor passed a catheter through his own arm vein into his heart in 1929, later sharing a Nobel Prize?

Werner Forssmann risked his life, not knowing whether the tube would pierce the vein. His reward was a share of the 1956 Nobel Prize for making cardiac catheterization possible.

Which African American surgeon built large-scale blood banks in World War II and protested segregated blood donation?

Charles R. Drew argued that separating donated blood by race had no scientific foundation. The American Red Cross kept the policy until 1950.

Which malaria drug did Tu Youyou discover in sweet wormwood, a traditional Chinese herb, earning a 2015 Nobel Prize?

Artemisinin made Tu the first Chinese Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, and the drug has saved millions of lives across Asia, Africa and South America.

Which German founder of bacteriology found the bacteria behind anthrax and tuberculosis, winning a 1905 Nobel Prize?

Robert Koch announced the tuberculosis finding on 24 March 1882, a date the World Health Organization now marks every year as World Tuberculosis Day.

Which mosquito-borne infection is nicknamed 'break-bone fever' for the severe muscle and joint pains it brings?

Dengue is carried mainly by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Its milder form brings a sudden fever, a headache typically felt behind the eyes, and a rash.

Which disease of the neck glands was known as 'king's evil' because a royal touch was thought to be the only cure?

Scrofula is usually a tuberculosis infection of the lymph nodes in the neck, showing as a painless lump that slowly grows.

Mary Mallon, an Irish-born cook forcibly quarantined in New York in 1907, was a symptom-free carrier of which disease?

Typhoid fever reached up to fifty-seven people through her cooking, it is believed. She was freed in 1910 after swearing not to return to cooking as a career.