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173 free Doctor trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
15 free doctor trivia questions with answers. Think you know everything about doctors and medicine? Put your knowledge to the test with our comprehensive Doctor trivia quiz. From famous physicians throughout history to modern medical breakthroughs, this quiz covers fascinating facts about the medical profession and healthcare.
30 of 173 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which medical specialist diagnoses and treats conditions of the skin, hair and nails?
Dermatologist
Dermatologist: the skin is the body's largest organ, and a rash or sore is sometimes the first sign of a serious illness elsewhere, so a skin doctor may be the first to spot it.
Q 02A nephrologist is a doctor who specialises in diseases of what?
The kidneys
The kidneys: nephros is Greek for kidney, while the Latin word for the same organ, renes, gave us 'renal', which is why one organ carries two sets of medical terms.
Q 03A pulmonologist specialises in diseases of which part of the body?
Lungs and airways
Lungs and airways: because failing lungs mean ventilators and life support, many pulmonologists also train in critical care and help run intensive care units.
Q 04Which disease forced transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard to give up surgery?
Rheumatoid arthritis
Rheumatoid arthritis plagued Barnard for decades and finally stopped him operating in the early 1980s, some sixteen years after his famous 1967 first; he turned to writing instead.
Q 05Which instrument does a doctor use for auscultation during a physical examination?
Stethoscope
Stethoscope: auscultation comes from the Latin for listening, and the heart's familiar 'lub-dub' it picks up is the sound of valves snapping shut.
Q 06What is the medical term for persistently high blood pressure?
Hypertension
Hypertension is persistently elevated pressure in the arteries rather than a one-off spike; it is called the 'silent killer' because it usually causes no symptoms while damaging the heart, brain and kidneys.
Q 07A pediatrician provides medical care primarily to which demographic?
Children and adolescents
Children and adolescents: the name is Greek for 'child healer', and the specialty exists because a growing child's body differs from an adult's and needs different treatment.
Q 08Who is recognized as the founder of modern nursing, known for her work during the Crimean War?
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale, the 'Lady with the Lamp', opened the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas' Hospital in 1860; her polar-area diagrams showed most Crimean War deaths came from disease, not wounds.
Q 09Which medical specialist focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of cancer?
Oncologist
Oncologist: the name comes from the Greek onkos, 'mass'; cancer itself is Latin for crab, because ancient doctors thought a tumour's swollen veins looked like a crab's legs.
Q 10Which specialist treats disorders of the bones, joints, ligaments and tendons?
Orthopedist
An orthopedist (orthopaedic surgeon) treats the musculoskeletal system; Nicolas Andry coined 'orthopédie' in 1741 from the Greek for 'straight child', because the field began with correcting deformities in children.
Q 11Who is credited with the discovery of penicillin in 1928?
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming's mould was Penicillium rubens; Howard Florey and Ernst Chain later turned it into a usable drug and shared his 1945 Nobel Prize.
Q 12What is the medical term for an abnormally low level of blood sugar, typically under 70 mg/dL?
Hypoglycemia
Hypoglycemia starves the brain of the glucose it runs on, bringing shakiness and confusion and, untreated, loss of consciousness; fast sugar such as glucose tablets or a sweet drink reverses it.
Q 13Which type of medical doctor specializes in eye and vision care, and is qualified to perform eye surgery?
Ophthalmologist
Q 21Joseph Lister pioneered antiseptic surgery at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary using which chemical?
Carbolic acid
Carbolic acid, now called phenol, was applied to wounds, instruments and dressings from August 1865 after Lister read Pasteur's work on germs; post-operative deaths on his wards fell sharply.
Q 22William Harvey's 1628 treatise on blood circulation is usually known by what short title?
De Motu Cordis
De Motu Cordis ('On the Motion of the Heart') argued from arithmetic: Harvey measured how much blood the heart pumps and saw it was far more than the body could keep making, so the same blood must circulate.
Q 23Christiaan Barnard's first heart-transplant patient, Louis Washkansky, survived for how long after the 1967 operation?
An ophthalmologist is a medical doctor and can operate; one, Harold Ridley, invented the artificial lens implant in 1949 after seeing that cockpit-plastic splinters sat harmlessly in RAF pilots' eyes.
Q 14What branch of medicine treats and prevents mental, emotional and behavioural disorders?
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is practised by medical doctors, so unlike most psychologists a psychiatrist can prescribe medication and order blood tests or brain scans to rule out a physical cause.
Q 15Which scan spins X-rays around the body and lets a computer build cross-sectional images?
CT scan
CT scan: the first scanner was built at EMI, the Beatles' record label, and its first patient scan, at a London hospital in 1971, showed a cyst in the brain.
Q 16In 1816 René Laennec invented a standard doctor's instrument because he disliked doing what?
Putting his ear directly on a woman's chest
He was uncomfortable putting his ear directly on a woman's chest, so Laennec rolled a sheet of paper into a tube and found it carried her heart sounds clearly without any contact.
Q 17The original Hippocratic Oath opens by swearing to Apollo the Healer, Asclepius, and which two goddesses?
Hygieia and Panacea
Hygieia and Panacea personified health and cures: Hygieia's name shares its Greek root with 'hygiene', and Panacea's means 'all-healing', which is why a cure-all is still called a panacea.
Q 18The 1796 experiment that gave us the word 'vaccine' used matter from which disease?
Cowpox
Cowpox, a mild disease milkmaids caught from cattle, shielded people from a far deadlier pox; its Latin name, variolae vaccinae, comes from vacca, 'cow', and gave us the word 'vaccine'.
Q 19How did Elizabeth Blackwell get into Geneva Medical College in 1847?
The male students voted her in as a joke
The male students voted her in as a joke: Geneva's faculty, sure they would refuse, left the decision to the students; Blackwell graduated in 1849 as the first woman with an American medical degree.
Q 20In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis cut maternal deaths in Vienna by making doctors wash their hands in what?
Chlorinated lime solution
Semmelweis made doctors scrub in chlorinated lime solution before examining mothers; deaths on his ward fell from about 18% to around 2% within months, yet most doctors resisted the idea and he died in an asylum in 1865.
18 days
18 days: Washkansky regained consciousness and chatted with his wife before pneumonia, helped along by the drugs suppressing rejection, killed him on 21 December 1967; Barnard's second patient, Philip Blaiberg, lived 19 months.
Q 24Barnard performed the first human heart transplant at which Cape Town hospital?
Groote Schuur
Groote Schuur Hospital, the University of Cape Town's teaching hospital, hosted the 3 December 1967 operation; the original theatres now house the Heart of Cape Town Museum.
Q 25Louis Pasteur is credited with vaccines against which two diseases?
Rabies and anthrax
Rabies and anthrax: Pasteur, a chemist rather than a physician, demonstrated an anthrax vaccine on sheep at Pouilly-le-Fort in 1881 and in 1885 gave his rabies vaccine to Joseph Meister, a boy bitten by a rabid dog.
Q 26Which Flemish anatomist's 1543 book De Humani Corporis Fabrica founded the modern study of human anatomy?
Andreas Vesalius
Andreas Vesalius, born in Brussels, broke with custom by doing the dissections himself in front of his students instead of leaving the cutting to a surgeon while he lectured.
Q 27The degree abbreviation MD stands for which Latin phrase?
Medicinae Doctor
Medicinae Doctor is Latin for 'doctor of medicine'; the letters run in the reverse of English order because the Latin phrase puts 'of medicine' first.
Q 28North American medical schools took the MD title, in place of England's MB, from universities in which country?
Scotland
Scotland: America's first medical school, founded in Philadelphia in 1765, was set up by two Edinburgh graduates, and Scottish universities awarded the MD where English ones gave the MB.
Q 29Han-dynasty surgeon Hua Tuo is recorded as dosing patients before surgery with a numbing herbal powder dissolved in what?
Wine
Wine: the Book of the Later Han says Hua Tuo gave patients his 'mafeisan' powder in wine until they felt nothing; the formula died with him when the warlord Cao Cao had him executed.
Q 30Karl Koller showed in 1884 that cocaine numbs the eye, beating which Vienna colleague who was also studying the drug?
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud had praised cocaine in print as a stimulant and painkiller but mentioned its numbing power only in passing, so the credit for local anaesthesia went to Koller.