148 Fun Facts About Medicine

Which ancient Greek physician is widely regarded as the 'Father of Medicine'?

Hippocrates, born on the island of Kos around 460 BC, probably wrote few of the sixty or so medical works that carry his name, and perhaps not even the oath doctors still associate with him.

Which part of the eye turns cloudy in a cataract?

The lens clouds over when its proteins break down and clump together, usually with age; surgeons remove it and slip a clear artificial one into its place.

Which instrument did French physician René Laennec invent in 1816, at first a simple hollow tube of wood?

Stethoscope: Laennec was uneasy about pressing his ear to a young woman's chest, tried a rolled-up tube of paper instead, and found he could hear her heart more clearly than ever.

What is the outermost layer of the human skin called?

The epidermis has no blood supply of its own, and its surface is made of dead, keratin-filled cells that are shed all the time.

Which organ, the largest inside the body, both detoxifies your blood and makes the bile that breaks down fat?

The liver can grow back after losing a large part of itself, which is why surgeons can transplant part of a living donor's liver and the donor's remaining piece returns to almost full size.

Which imaging technique uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to picture soft tissue, with no ionising radiation?

MRI lines up the hydrogen atoms in the body's water with a powerful magnet and reads the radio signals they give off; that magnet is why every patient is asked about metal implants before going in.

Edward Jenner's pioneering vaccine, the world's first, targeted which disease?

Smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people over the centuries, yet it is now the only human disease ever eradicated: the World Health Organization declared the world free of it in 1980.

Which is the largest artery in the human body?

The aorta has elastic walls that stretch as each heartbeat fills it and spring back between beats, which keeps blood flowing smoothly while the heart refills.

What does a doctor mean by hypertension?

Hypertension means high blood pressure: persistently elevated pressure in the arteries, which forces the heart to work harder with every beat and damages blood vessels over time.

Which Scottish physician discovered penicillin in 1928, as a crude extract of a Penicillium mould?

Alexander Fleming came back from holiday to find that a stray mould had killed the bacteria on a culture plate left out on his bench; he first called the active substance 'mould juice'.

Which hormone did Banting and Best first isolate in Toronto in 1921?

Insulin was first tried in January 1922 on a 14-year-old boy dying of diabetes; the crude first dose did little, but a purified batch soon afterwards brought his blood sugar down and revived him.

Which German physicist at Wurzburg in 1895 produced the radiation that bears his name in many languages?

Wilhelm Rontgen called his discovery X-rays because their nature was unknown; one of his first pictures showed the bones of his wife's hand, with the shadow of the ring she was wearing.

Which South African surgeon carried out the world's first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967?

Christiaan Barnard operated at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town; his patient, Louis Washkansky, came through the surgery but died of pneumonia 18 days later, his defences knocked out by the drugs given to stop rejection.

What had Karl Landsteiner found in 1901 when he noticed samples from two people clump together on contact?

The blood groups explained why transfusions had so often ended in disaster: mixing incompatible types makes the red cells clump, so matching donor to patient at last made the procedure safe.

Which Hungarian physician cut maternal deaths in Vienna in 1847 by making doctors wash their hands?

Ignaz Semmelweis saw that the ward run by medical students, who came straight from the dissecting room, lost far more mothers than the midwives' ward, so he made them wash in chlorinated lime; he died in an asylum in 1865.

Whose 1628 treatise De Motu Cordis first described in full how the heart pumps blood around the body?

William Harvey, physician to James I and Charles I, showed that the heart pumps blood in a continuous circuit. He could not see the capillaries linking arteries to veins; Marcello Malpighi found them with a microscope in 1661.

Who was the first human given Louis Pasteur's rabies vaccine, on 6 July 1885?

A 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister had been badly bitten by a rabid dog; Pasteur, who was not a doctor, treated him with some reluctance, and the boy's survival helped bring in the donations that built the Pasteur Institute.

Which substance did Joseph Lister introduce in the 1860s to sterilise instruments, wounds and hands?

Carbolic acid, now called phenol, was already being used to stop sewage smelling, which gave Lister the idea of trying it on wounds; Listerine mouthwash was later named in his honour.

Which anaesthetic did Boston dentist William Morton demonstrate to an audience of surgeons in 1846?

Ether kept a patient still while a surgeon cut a tumour from his neck, in the same Boston theatre where another dentist's laughing-gas demonstration had failed; the room is now known as the Ether Dome.

What did Barry Marshall do in 1984 to back his claim that a bacterium causes stomach ulcers?

Drank a culture of it: hoping to persuade sceptics, Marshall swallowed a broth of Helicobacter pylori, went down with gastritis within days and then took antibiotics; a Nobel Prize followed in 2005.

Which German bacteriologist identified the agents of TB, cholera and anthrax and set four postulates?

Robert Koch announced the tuberculosis bacillus on 24 March 1882, the date now marked each year as World TB Day; his four postulates set the conditions a microbe must meet before it can be blamed for a disease.

Whose 1543 De humani corporis fabrica earned him the title of founder of modern anatomy?

Andreas Vesalius was 28 when the Fabrica appeared in Basel in 1543; its woodcuts, probably drawn in Titian's studio, showed what he had found by dissecting human bodies, where Galen had relied on animals.

Paul Ehrlich's Salvarsan (1910) was the first effective medicinal treatment for which disease?

Salvarsan, an arsenic compound, was the first effective drug against syphilis; it was number 606 in Ehrlich's screening programme, hence its early nickname. Ehrlich called a drug that kills only its target a Zauberkugel, or magic bullet.

What passed through railroad foreman Phineas Gage's skull in an 1848 accident in Cavendish, Vermont?

A metre-long tamping iron, the rod he used to pack blasting powder, shot in below his left cheekbone and out through the top of his skull; Gage was awake and talking straight afterwards and lived for more than eleven years.

Virginia Apgar's 1952 score checks the health of which patients?

Newborn babies are scored 0 to 2 on each of five signs, one and five minutes after birth; years later the signs were renamed to spell out her surname: appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, respiration.

The Glasgow scale of 1974 rates eyes, speech and movement to grade what?

Level of consciousness is scored from 3 to 15 on the Glasgow Coma Scale; each of the three responses scores at least 1, so even a patient who does nothing at all gets 3, not 0.

In which country was the last natural case of smallpox recorded, in 1977?

Somalia's Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital worker in the port of Merca, caught it in October 1977, recovered, and later spent years working as a vaccinator himself; a laboratory accident in England caused one last death in 1978.

The Rh factor in blood typing takes its name from which animal used in the original experiments?

A monkey, the rhesus macaque, supplied the blood used in the first tests for the factor, hence 'Rh'; it matters most in pregnancy, when an Rh-negative mother can make antibodies against her Rh-positive baby's blood.

Broca's area, linked to speech production, sits in which lobe of the brain, usually in the left hemisphere?

Paul Broca located the region in the left frontal lobe in 1861 through patient Louis Victor Leborgne, known as 'Tan' because that syllable was all he could say. Leborgne's brain was preserved in a Paris museum.

FDA reviewer Frances Kelsey was honoured by JFK in 1962 for refusing to approve which drug?

Kelsey withheld approval of thalidomide, pressing its US licensee for safety data it could not supply, so America was largely spared the birth-defect tragedy seen in Europe; JFK gave her the President's Award in August 1962.

What did Stanley Prusiner name the protein-only infectious agent that won him the 1997 Nobel Prize?

Prions cause BSE in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in people; the claim that a bare protein with no genes could be infectious met great scepticism, and prions resist treatments that destroy ordinary germs.

Joseph Murray's first successful kidney transplant, in 1954, escaped rejection because donor and recipient were what?

Identical twins share the same genes, so Richard Herrick's body accepted his brother Ronald's kidney; the work won Murray a share of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Haemophilia B is also called Christmas disease after what?

Its first described patient was a boy named Stephen Christmas; by coincidence, the 1952 paper that named the disease after him appeared in the Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.

Legionnaires' disease got its name from a 1976 outbreak at an American Legion convention in which city?

Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel hosted the convention; it took until January 1977 to find the cause, a bacterium new to science that had been breeding in the water of the hotel's air-conditioning system.

'Typhoid Mary' Mallon spread the disease through which job?

Mary Mallon worked as a cook and carried typhoid from household to household without ever seeming ill herself; she was confined on New York's North Brother Island for about 26 years in all, until her death in 1938.

In 1939 the Nazi government forced Prontosil discoverer Gerhard Domagk to do what?

Decline the Nobel Prize: Hitler had barred Germans from accepting one after the jailed pacifist Carl von Ossietzky won the Peace Prize, and the Gestapo arrested Domagk; he finally received his medal in 1947.

Which is the only human bone not connected to any other bone?

The hyoid, a U-shaped bone at the root of the tongue, hangs from muscles and ligaments alone; because it can break when the throat is squeezed, pathologists check it when strangulation is suspected.

The transplant drug ciclosporin was isolated in 1971 from what?

A soil fungus, Tolypocladium inflatum, turned up in samples that Sandoz staff brought back from Norway and Wisconsin; tested as a possible antifungal drug, it proved to quieten the immune system instead.

The toxin often called the deadliest natural substance known is made by which bacterium?

Clostridium botulinum makes botulinum toxin, one of the most lethal substances known, yet in minute doses the same toxin is sold as Botox to smooth wrinkles and calm muscle spasms.

The ring of arteries at the base of the brain is named after which 17th-century English physician?

Thomas Willis described the ring in 1664 in a book with drawings by Christopher Wren; because it joins the brain's main arteries into a loop, blood can still get through by another route if one is blocked.

The islets of Langerhans, hormone-producing cell clusters discovered in 1869, are in which organ?

The pancreas holds about a million of these islets; Paul Langerhans described them in his 1869 Berlin thesis, while still a student, and had no idea what they were for.

Which cranial nerve, the tenth, has a Latin name meaning 'wandering'?

Vagus is Latin for wandering, the root of vague and vagabond, and the nerve earns the name: it runs from the brain through the chest to the abdomen, slowing the heart and driving digestion on the way.

Asked on TV in 1955 who owned the patent on his new vaccine, Jonas Salk replied 'Could you patent' what?

The sun: his answer began 'Well, the people, I would say', and he meant it, taking no profit from sharing the vaccine with the firms that went on to make it.

Auguste Deter, a Frankfurt patient first examined in 1901, was the first person diagnosed with which disease?

Alzheimer's disease is named after Alois Alzheimer, who followed Deter from the age of 51 and, after her death in 1906, found in her brain the plaques and tangles that still define the illness.

An infant's skeleton has dozens more bones than an adult's 206; what happens to the extras?

They fuse together: many of a baby's bones begin as separate pieces, partly made of soft cartilage, and knit into single bones as the child grows, as the five vertebrae of the sacrum do.

What do mature human red blood cells lack, in order to leave maximum room for haemoglobin?

A nucleus is pushed out as each red cell matures in the bone marrow, which leaves more room for haemoglobin but means the finished cell can never divide or renew itself.

The brain is about 2% of body weight but uses about a fifth of the body's energy, mainly as which fuel?

Glucose is the brain's main fuel, and it burns more of it than any other organ; only when sugar runs low, as in a long fast, does it switch to ketones made from fat.

In a nephron, the tuft of capillaries where blood is filtered is called what?

The glomerulus is a knot of capillaries inside Bowman's capsule; the sheer force of the blood arriving there pushes water and small molecules out through the capillary walls, and the tubule beyond takes most of it back.

How many pairs of cranial nerves are conventionally recognised, numbered with Roman numerals?

Twelve pairs are numbered I to XII in the order they emerge, starting with the olfactory nerve of smell nearest the nose and ending with the hypoglossal nerve that moves the tongue.

Which bone is the longest in the human body?

The femur, or thigh bone, makes up about a quarter of a person's height, a ratio steady enough that anthropologists can estimate how tall someone was from a thigh bone alone.

The adrenal glands, which make adrenaline and cortisol, sit above which organs?

The kidneys each wear one adrenal gland like a cap, and the name says so: adrenal is built from the Latin for 'near the kidney', and its other name, suprarenal, means 'above the kidney'.

Which gland in the neck, just below the Adam's apple, is described as butterfly-shaped?

The thyroid wraps around the windpipe, its two lobes joined by a narrow bridge of tissue; its hormones are built from iodine, which is why many countries add iodine to table salt.

The Ebola virus, first identified in 1976, takes its name from what?

A river: the scientists who identified the virus named it after the Ebola River rather than after Yambuku, the village where the 1976 outbreak began, so that the village would not carry the stigma.

The word 'vaccine' derives from the Latin name for which animal?

Cow is vacca in Latin: the first vaccine was made from a mild infection of cattle that milkmaids caught from their herds, and Louis Pasteur later stretched the word to cover every such inoculation.

Unlike Jonas Salk's injected vaccine, how was Albert Sabin's live attenuated one given?

By mouth, as drops or on a sugar cube: Sabin reasoned that a live, weakened virus swallowed like the real one, which infects the gut, would protect for longer than a killed virus given by needle.

James Lind's 1747 experiment aboard HMS Salisbury tested six cures for which disease?

Lind split a dozen scurvy-stricken sailors into six pairs, each given a different remedy from cider to vinegar; the two fed oranges and lemons recovered fastest, though the Royal Navy took until 1795 to issue citrus.

The iron lung, a tank ventilator, is most associated with epidemics of which disease?

Polio can paralyse the muscles used for breathing; the iron lung, a sealed tank around the body, breathed for such patients by drawing air out and letting it back in, until vaccines made it all but obsolete.

The stapes, the smallest bone in the human body, is named for its resemblance to what?

A stirrup is stapes in medieval Latin; the ancient Romans rode without stirrups and had no word for them, so the anatomists who found the bone in the 1500s had to borrow a later coinage.

Felix Hoffmann is credited with first making pure, stable acetylsalicylic acid in 1897 at which firm?

Bayer named the drug Aspirin and was selling it worldwide by 1899; after the First World War the firm lost its grip on the trademark in many countries, and 'aspirin' became an everyday word.

Pfizer was seeking a drug for which condition in 1989 when it found sildenafil (Viagra)?

Pfizer made sildenafil as a treatment for angina, hoping it would relax the heart's blood vessels; it did little for the heart, but men in the trials reported a striking side effect, and Viagra was approved in 1998.

Which lead dog on the final leg of the 1925 Nome serum run has a statue in Central Park?

Balto led Gunnar Kaasen's team on the final leg into Nome and had his Central Park statue within the year, though Togo, Leonhard Seppala's lead dog, had run by far the longest stretch of the relay.

Which Egyptian official, credited with designing the first pyramid, was worshipped centuries later as a god of medicine?

Imhotep served King Djoser about 4,600 years ago, yet almost nothing is known of him as a man; his fame as a healer grew over the centuries until the Greeks identified him with their own god Asclepius.

John Snow curbed an 1854 Soho cholera outbreak by persuading the council to remove what?

A water pump's handle came off the Broad Street pump after Snow traced the deaths to the homes around it; by his own account the outbreak was already fading, but the story became a founding legend of epidemiology.

Quinine was first isolated in 1820 from the bark of which South American tree?

Cinchona bark gave the world quinine, for centuries the standard remedy for malaria; newer drugs replaced it, but it came back into use when the parasite grew resistant to them.

The word 'placebo' is Latin for what?

Placebo is Latin for 'I shall please', the opening word of the medieval Vespers for the dead; its dark counterpart is the nocebo, 'I shall harm', when expecting a bad effect from an inert treatment produces one.

The blood thinner warfarin first went into large-scale commercial use in 1948 as what?

Warfarin was marketed from 1948 as a rat poison, killing rodents by internal bleeding, and was approved for human use in 1954; it blocks the recycling of vitamin K, and its name honours the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

In 1948 Australian psychiatrist John Cade found that salts of which element calmed mania?

Lithium made Cade's guinea pigs so placid that he swallowed some himself to check it was safe, then gave it to manic patients; his 1949 paper helped open the modern era of drug treatment in psychiatry.

The sinoatrial node, which sets the rhythm of the heartbeat, sits in the wall of which chamber?

The sinoatrial node lies in the upper wall of the right atrium, near the entrance of the superior vena cava; its cells fire spontaneously to set the sinus rhythm, and autonomic nerves speed or slow that rate.

Roughly how long does a mature human red blood cell circulate before being recycled?

120 days is about the limit: by then a red cell has worn out and is broken down by scavenger cells, and to keep pace the bone marrow turns out some two million new ones every second.

Stewart Adams discovered ibuprofen in 1961 while working for which British company?

Boots employed Adams in its Nottingham laboratories, where the compound was picked out in 1961 and launched as a prescription drug in 1969; he once tried it on his own hangover before giving a speech, and it worked.

Which chemist in 1949 blamed sickle cell disease on a flaw in the haemoglobin molecule?

Linus Pauling's team showed in 1949 that sickle-cell haemoglobin differs from the normal kind, the first disease traced to a faulty molecule; carrying one copy of the gene gives some protection against malaria.

From AD 157 Galen sharpened his anatomy as physician to which group in Pergamon?

Gladiators were Galen's training ground: with human dissection ruled out by Roman custom, their wounds gave him a rare view inside the living body, and he went on to serve the emperor Marcus Aurelius in Rome.

John Charnley pioneered which operation at Wrightington Hospital in the 1960s?

Charnley's low-friction hip replacement of 1962 paired a small metal femoral head with a polyethylene socket fixed with bone cement; he insisted on working with engineers and built a biomechanics lab at Wrightington to test his implants.

Which drug, approved in the US in 1987, was the first treatment for HIV?

AZT was first made in 1964 as a possible cancer drug, failed and was shelved; pulled back out in the 1980s, it became in 1987 the first drug approved against HIV, though on its own it only slows the virus.

Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen found the bacterium behind which disease?

Hansen identified Mycobacterium leprae in Bergen in 1873, one of the first bacteria tied to a human disease, which is why leprosy is often called Hansen's disease.

Why did the 1918 influenza pandemic get its misleading 'Spanish' name?

Spain was neutral in the First World War, so its press reported the outbreak freely while censors in the warring nations kept it quiet; Spaniards, for their part, called it the French flu.

A US government study that left hundreds of Black men untreated until 1972 is named for which Alabama town?

Tuskegee was home to the institute whose help the government enlisted; an Associated Press story ended the study in 1972, and Congress answered with a law requiring ethics boards to approve research on people.

Edinburgh obstetrician James Young Simpson popularised which anaesthetic from 1847?

Chloroform was Simpson's find of November 1847: he and two assistants inhaled it one evening in his dining room and promptly passed out; Queen Victoria's use of it in childbirth in 1853 did much to silence his critics.

Napoleon's surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey invented 'flying ambulances' and a rule for what?

Larrey's 'flying ambulances' adapted the light carriages of the horse artillery to carry the wounded off the field, and his rule of triage had them treated by urgency of need regardless of rank or nationality.

What did Scipione Riva-Rocci's easy-to-use device of 1896 measure?

Blood pressure became simple to read with Riva-Rocci's inflatable arm cuff and mercury column; the American surgeon Harvey Cushing saw the device in Pavia in 1901 and took the idea home, where it soon caught on.

Tu Youyou's Nobel-winning malaria drug artemisinin was extracted from which plant?

Artemisinin comes from sweet wormwood, Artemisia annua (qinghao); Tu found the lead in Ge Hong's fourth-century handbook recommending the herb for intermittent fevers, and in 2015 became the first Chinese laureate in Physiology or Medicine.

Which device did John Gibbon use successfully for the first time on 6 May 1953?

Gibbon's heart-lung machine did the work of both organs on 6 May 1953 while he closed a hole between the upper chambers of an 18-year-old patient's heart, the first open-heart operation to succeed with one.

Willem Einthoven won the 1924 Nobel Prize for inventing which diagnostic instrument?

Einthoven's electrocardiograph, a string galvanometer, filled two rooms and weighed about 270 kg; within a few decades makers had shrunk it to a model that could be wheeled to the bedside.

Karl Koller introduced which drug as a local anaesthetic for eye surgery in 1884?

Cocaine drops numb the surface of the eye, as Koller showed in 1884, making painless eye surgery possible; his Vienna colleague Sigmund Freud had studied the drug's effects but missed this use for it.

Baruch Blumberg's discovery of the 'Australia antigen' in the 1960s led to a vaccine against which virus?

The Australia antigen turned out to be the surface protein of the hepatitis B virus; Blumberg had spotted it in the blood of an Australian Aboriginal man, shared the 1976 Nobel Prize, and helped develop the first hepatitis B vaccine.

Emil von Behring won the first Medicine Nobel (1901) for serum therapy against what?

Diphtheria was a major killer of children when Behring showed in 1890 that blood serum from an immunised animal could neutralise its toxin and cure infected animals.

Which device was first implanted in a patient, Arne Larsson, in Stockholm in October 1958?

Pacemaker number one went into Arne Larsson, a 43-year-old engineer, at his wife's urging; he got through more than twenty of them and lived until 2001, outliving the man who built the first.

Witnessing the aftermath of which 1859 battle moved Henry Dunant to found the Red Cross?

Dunant reached Solferino on 24 June 1859, having gone to northern Italy to petition Napoleon III; his 1862 book A Memory of Solferino called for neutral relief societies, and he shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.

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

In vitro fertilisation was the work of gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe and scientist Robert Edwards, who had been at it for a decade; only Edwards lived to see it win a Nobel Prize, in 2010.

Willem Kolff's 1943 prototype dialysis machine used which odd material as its membrane?

Sausage casings served as the filter, wound on a device built from orange-juice cans and car parts in the occupied Netherlands; patient after patient died on it before one finally pulled through, in 1945.

Edinburgh physician Alexander Wood is credited with inventing which device in 1853?

Wood's hypodermic syringe of 1853 paired a glass syringe with a hollow needle, letting him inject morphine under the skin to treat neuralgia; Charles Pravaz in Lyon devised a similar instrument the same year.

Médecins Sans Frontières was founded in 1971 by French doctors in the aftermath of what?

MSF's founders, including Bernard Kouchner, had worked for the Red Cross during the Biafran famine of the Nigerian Civil War and wanted care delivered across borders regardless of politics; the group won the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize.

Which woman, admitted to a New York medical college in 1847 by a joke student vote, became America's first female MD?

Elizabeth Blackwell got in when the students of Geneva Medical College, asked to vote on her application, said yes as a joke; she went on to graduate first in her class in 1849.

Alexandre Yersin, sent to Hong Kong during an 1894 epidemic, identified the bacterium behind which disease?

Plague's bacillus was found that summer by two men working independently, Yersin and the Japanese bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburo; it was Yersin's name that stuck, in Yersinia pestis.

The sella turcica, or 'Turkish saddle', is a hollow in the skull's sphenoid bone that cradles which gland?

The pituitary, a pea-sized gland, sits in the saddle just beneath the crossing of the optic nerves, which is why a tumour growing there can first show itself as a loss of side vision.

Akira Endo found the first of which class of drugs in a mould growing on rice from Kyoto?

Statins began with a compound Endo found after testing more than 6,000 cultures; he had guessed that moulds might block the making of cholesterol as a weapon against rival microbes.

Goat's rue, a meadow plant used in medieval herbal medicine, led chemists to which widely prescribed diabetes drug?

Metformin descends from galegine, the active compound in goat's rue; galegine itself was tried on patients in the 1920s and proved too toxic, so chemists built safer relatives on the same pattern.

Hans Berger recorded the first human EEG in 1924 and named which rhythm, seen when a relaxed person closes their eyes?

Alpha waves fade when the eyes open or the mind gets busy, giving way to the faster rhythm Berger named beta; he did not publish his recordings until 1929, five years after the first.

Which Bee Gees hit, at about 103 beats a minute, is used to teach the right pace for CPR chest compressions?

Stayin' Alive sits inside the 100 to 120 compressions a minute that resuscitation guidelines recommend, so trainers use it as a metronome people can hum in their heads.

American doctor Henry Heimlich gave his name to a manoeuvre of abdominal thrusts for someone who is doing what?

Choking is the emergency the Heimlich manoeuvre treats. In 2016, aged 96, Heimlich said he had used it himself on a fellow resident of his retirement home.

The face of CPR manikin Resusci Anne copies the death mask of an unknown woman reputedly drowned in which city?

Paris is where the story places her, pulled from the Seine near the Louvre in the 1880s. Casts of her calm face hung in artists' homes long before a toymaker gave it to his training manikin.

The six-pointed Star of Life on ambulances carries at its centre the snake-entwined rod of which Greek god?

Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, carried a staff with a single snake. The star's six arms stand for the six stages of an emergency response, from detection to transfer to definitive care.

The world's oldest emergency telephone number, 999, was first introduced in June 1937 in and around which city?

London got 999 on 30 June 1937, covering 12 miles around Oxford Circus. Within days a Hampstead woman's call led to a burglar being caught in the act.

Which bestselling novelist created the TV drama ER, drawing on his own days as a medical student?

Michael Crichton wrote it in 1974 as a film script called EW, for Emergency Ward. Producers passed, and it waited two decades until Steven Spielberg helped turn it into a television pilot.

The FAST test, which checks the face, arms and speech, helps bystanders spot which medical emergency?

A stroke is what FAST flags, and its final T is a reminder to call an ambulance at once. British doctors and ambulance crews devised the test in 1998 as part of a training package.

Laws shielding bystanders who give emergency aid from being sued are named after which figure in a Gospel parable?

The Good Samaritan, who stops to tend a beaten traveller in Luke's Gospel, lends his name to laws written so that fear of a lawsuit never stops a passer-by from helping.

Which hydraulic rescue tool, used to cut crash victims out of cars, was first used in 1963 to free racing drivers?

Jaws of Life got its name because people said the tool snatched victims from the jaws of death. George Hurst devised it after watching a stock-car driver stay trapped for over an hour.

The word ambulance, now a vehicle with sirens and stretchers, comes from the Latin verb ambulare, which means what?

To walk is the sense of ambulare. The word came through French, where a field hospital that moved with an army was called a walking hospital, long before it meant a vehicle.

In 1965 Belfast cardiologist Frank Pantridge fitted an ambulance with the first portable version of which device?

Defibrillator number one weighed 70 kg and ran off car batteries. By 1968 Pantridge had cut it to 3 kg, using a miniature capacitor made for NASA.

Trauma surgeon R Adams Cowley promoted which two-word name for the critical period straight after a severe injury?

The golden hour is when prompt surgery is most likely to prevent death. Cowley pushed the idea first as a military surgeon, then as head of Maryland's Shock Trauma Center.

Which Vienna-born anaesthesiologist, called the father of CPR, wrote the 1957 book ABC of Resuscitation?

Peter Safar escaped the Holocaust, qualified in 1948 and moved to the United States a year later. He also helped develop the Resusci Anne manikin that generations of trainees have practised on.

Which bleeding-control device, tightened in early versions by twisting a rod, is named from the French for 'to turn'?

Tourniquet comes from tourner. In 1718 French surgeon Jean Louis Petit swapped the twisted rod for a screw, though soldiers were already binding wounded limbs in Alexander the Great's campaigns.

Which drug, sold as the nasal spray Narcan, is used to reverse an opioid overdose?

Naloxone restores the breathing that opioids suppress, working within two minutes when given into a vein and in about ten as a nasal spray.

Which substance do emergency doctors give to adsorb certain swallowed poisons, ideally within an hour?

Activated charcoal traps toxins on its surface before the gut can take them up. Syrup of ipecac, once the front-line way to make a poisoned patient vomit, is no longer recommended.

EpiPens are carried by people at risk of which sudden reaction, discovered by Charles Richet and Paul Portier?

Anaphylaxis came to light after 1901, when the Prince of Monaco took the two French physiologists to sea to study the toxins of jellyfish and sea anemones.

Many American and Australian hospitals page 'code' followed by which word when a patient goes into cardiac arrest?

Blue signals a cardiac arrest, while red usually means fire. Coded announcements summon staff quickly without spreading stress and panic among hospital visitors.

Emergency teams use the 'rule of nines' to estimate quickly the share of the body's surface affected by what?

Burns are sized by dividing the body into multiples of nine per cent, with a whole leg counting as 18. The surgeon who published the rule in 1951 was, aptly, Alexander Burns Wallace.

Which colourless, odourless gas from faulty heaters and car exhausts do miners call whitedamp or the silent killer?

Carbon monoxide latches onto haemoglobin, so the blood can no longer carry the oxygen tissues need. It is the most common type of fatal air poisoning in many countries.

Which TV doctor, played by Hugh Laurie, leads the diagnosticians of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital?

Gregory House was loosely modelled on Sherlock Holmes, and the series was pitched as a medical whodunit in which the symptoms are the clues.

In American medical slang, an exotic diagnosis is named after which animal, from a 1940s saying about hoofbeats?

A zebra is the rare answer doctors are warned not to chase first. Theodore Woodward taught his Maryland interns that hoofbeats nearly always turn out to be something far more ordinary.

Godfrey Hounsfield built the first CT scanner at which British company, better known as the Beatles' record label?

EMI hired Hounsfield in 1949 to work on radar and guided weapons, and he later helped design Britain's first commercially available all-transistor computer before turning to scanners.

Glasgow obstetrician Ian Donald pioneered which scanning method after seeing a boiler works use it to check welds?

Ultrasound was an industrial tool for finding cracks in metal. On a 1955 factory visit Donald tried it on tissue samples, with a huge steak supplied by the company as his control.

The Pap test, named after Greek-born doctor Georgios Papanikolaou, screens for cancer of which part of the body?

The cervix is where the smear's cells are collected. Papanikolaou reported in 1928 that cancer cells could be spotted this way, but his work was not widely recognised until the 1940s.

Leopold Auenbrugger devised chest percussion for diagnosis after seeing which items tested at his father's hotel?

Wine casks were sounded to judge the level inside, and Auenbrugger applied the idea to the human chest. The method spread only later, once Jean-Nicolas Corvisart taught it to his students in France.

Shinobu Ishihara's plates of dots hiding numbers, first published in 1917, are used to detect which condition?

Colour blindness of the red-green kind is what the plates catch: each number is hidden so that an affected viewer reads a different figure, such as 21 where others see 74.

A spreading 'bull's-eye' rash around a bite can be an early clue to which tick-borne illness?

Lyme disease was pinned down in 1975, when a cluster of cases first taken for juvenile arthritis around Lyme and Old Lyme turned out to be something new.

Which instrument did English physician Clifford Allbutt shrink in 1867 from a foot long to a pocket-sized six inches?

Thermometer readings had meant holding a foot-long instrument in place for about twenty minutes. Allbutt's short version was one a doctor could carry habitually in a pocket.

Which autoimmune disease, one of several called 'the great imitator', takes its name from the Latin for wolf?

Lupus got its name in the 13th century, when its rash was thought to resemble a wolf's bite. Doctors now watch for a butterfly-shaped rash across the cheeks and nose.

Friedrich Sertürner named which painkiller, isolated from opium in 1804, after the Greek god of dreams?

Morphine honours Morpheus because the drug tends to bring on drowsiness. It is believed to be the first medicinal alkaloid ever isolated from a plant.

The painkiller paracetamol, sold as Tylenol and Panadol, goes by which other generic name in the United States?

Acetaminophen was coined in 1955 by McNeil Laboratories as a shortening of the drug's full scientific name. Paracetamol, coined a year later, is a different clipping of the same long name.

Which explosive, the active ingredient of dynamite, has also been prescribed for heart conditions since 1878?

Nitroglycerin is a potent widener of blood vessels. Alfred Nobel turned the unstable liquid into dynamite after an 1864 factory explosion killed his younger brother Emil.

Which tranquilliser from Leo Sternbach's team at Roche was America's best-selling medicine from 1968 to 1982?

Valium, the brand name of diazepam, sold more than two billion tablets in the United States in 1978 alone.

Nitrogen mustards, the first chemotherapy drugs used against cancer, were originally produced for which purpose?

Chemical warfare agents studied at Yale went into classified lymphoma trials in 1942. A year later, survivors of a mustard gas release during an air raid on Bari showed a telling fall in lymphocytes.

The diabetes drug exenatide is a synthetic copy of a peptide found in the venom of which lizard?

Gila monster venom drew a researcher's interest because the animal eats only once or twice a year. The drug built on its peptide was approved in the United States in 2005.

Salicin, a natural compound related to aspirin, is produced in and named after the bark of which tree?

Willow is Salix in Latin, which gave salicin and salicylic acid their names. The same compound is also found in the bark and leaves of poplars.

The prescription symbol Rx, a crossed capital R, abbreviates which Latin word meaning 'take'?

Recipe was the first word of a medieval prescription: an order to the apothecary to take the listed materials and compound them into a treatment.

Which gas, used by dentists as a mild anaesthetic, was nicknamed 'laughing gas' by chemist Humphry Davy?

Nitrous oxide was a party drug first: upper-class 'laughing gas parties' began in 1799, and only in 1844 did dentist Horace Wells show it could dull the pain of an extraction.

Which South American arrow poison, made by boiling bark into a dark paste, became a muscle relaxant in hospitals?

Curare kills prey by stopping the breathing muscles from contracting. In the operating theatre the same paralysis, under control, means far less anaesthetic is needed.

Which tiny air sacs in the lungs, named from the Latin for 'little cavities', are where gas exchange takes place?

Alveoli number 300 to 500 million in a pair of human lungs, and the airways that feed them would stretch for roughly 2,400 kilometres laid end to end.

A hiccup is a sudden involuntary contraction of which muscle?

The diaphragm flattens as it contracts, enlarging the chest cavity so that the drop in pressure inside draws air into the lungs.

The metering valve in the first pressurised asthma inhalers of the 1950s was originally designed to dispense what?

Perfume valves and a CFC propellant were the two new technologies that made the inhaler possible. It replaced a fragile and unreliable squeeze-bulb nebuliser.

Which inherited disorder of the lungs is diagnosed with a sweat test because sufferers' sweat is abnormally salty?

Cystic fibrosis makes children lose so much salt in their sweat that parents may notice crystals forming on the skin, or a salty taste when they kiss their child.

Richard Doll first blamed tarmac or car fumes for lung cancer, until a 1950 study of patients pointed to what?

Smoking was the only factor the patients had in common. Doll gave up tobacco himself as a result of what he and Austin Bradford Hill had found.

More than 80% of cases of mesothelioma, a cancer of the lung lining, are caused by exposure to which fireproof mineral?

Asbestos takes its name from the Greek for 'unquenchable'. It was a favourite fire-resistant building material for much of the 20th century, until its dangers were acknowledged in the 1970s.

What is the everyday name for the trachea, the tube of horseshoe-shaped cartilage rings running down from the larynx?

The windpipe ends at the carina, the point where it forks into the left and right main bronchi that carry air into each lung.

Which fingertip clip, developed in 1972 by Japan's Takuo Aoyagi, monitors the blood using red and infrared light?

Pulse oximeter readings show how saturated the blood is with oxygen, judged from the light it absorbs. Its maker sought no basic patent outside Japan, which let others take the idea further.

Australian physician Colin Sullivan invented the CPAP machine in 1980 to treat which night-time disorder?

Sleep apnoea patients at the world's first clinic for the condition wore machines and masks that Sullivan helped make by hand in a Sydney hospital workshop.

Which quantity, the most air a person can exhale after a full breath, did John Hutchinson's 1846 spirometer measure?

Vital capacity rises with height and falls with age, as Hutchinson showed by testing more than 4,000 people. Weight, he found, made no difference at any given height.