Hippocrates Trivia
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46 free Hippocrates trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Hippocrates trivia quiz covers the Greek physician from Kos who is called the Father of Medicine, and the school and writings that carry his name. It follows the son of a physician trained at the island's asklepieion, the idea that disease has natural causes rather than divine ones, the four humours, the doctrine of the crisis, prognosis and case histories, the treatments for fevers, fractures and haemorrhoids, the seventy-odd works of the Hippocratic Corpus, and the Oath that most modern scholars think he did not write but that doctors still swear versions of today. The easy questions are ones most people know: his title, his island, his oath. The medium ones ask about his family, the humours, his methods and the signs and devices named after him. The hard ones dig into Soranus, the Knidian school, Primum non nocere, the Declaration of Geneva, the plane tree of Kos and the dragon legend in Mandeville's Travels. It suits a medical-school icebreaker, a history of science round or anyone who has ever been told to feed a cold and starve a fever. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01By what title is Hippocrates traditionally known?
The Father of Medicine
The Father of Medicine is his traditional title, yet little is known for certain of what he himself wrote or did: his deeds were merged with those of the doctors who wrote under his name.
Q 02On which Greek island was Hippocrates born around 460 BC?
Kos
Kos, an island off the coast of Asia Minor, was his birthplace around 460 BC, but he did not stay: he taught and practised across the Greek world, travelling as far north as Thrace.
Q 03Which Greek god, invoked as a healer, is the first that the Hippocratic Oath swears by?
Apollo
Apollo heads the list of healing gods the Oath calls to witness, yet scholars doubt Hippocrates wrote it, and it may date from after his death.
Q 04In a famous legend, Hippocrates refuses rich gifts to treat the plague-stricken army of which enemy empire?
Persia
Persia's king Artaxerxes is said to have begged him to cure his troops; Hippocrates would not help an enemy of Greece, a scene Girodet painted in 1792, though historians treat the tale as fiction.
Q 05Hippocrates is said to have named tumours 'karkinos' after which creature, whose legs their swollen veins recalled?
Crab
Crab is the meaning of karkinos and of the Roman word that later replaced it, cancer; the name is credited to Hippocrates, who saw a tumour's spreading veins as the legs of the animal.
Q 06The name Hippocrates is built on the Greek word for which animal?
Horse
Horse: the name joins hippos, 'horse', and kratos, 'power'. Horse names often signalled a noble family, and in Aristophanes's comedy The Clouds a well-born wife insists that her son's name must have a horse in it.
Q 07Which two contemporaries mention Hippocrates in passing in their writings?
Plato and Aristotle
Plato and Aristotle each mention him only in passing, Plato as a famous doctor who taught for a fee; almost everything else told of his life was written some 500 years later.
Q 08What was hippocras, the medieval drink named after Hippocrates?
Spiced, sweetened wine
Spiced, sweetened wine took his name because it was strained through a cloth filter bag known as a Hippocratic sleeve; dictionaries still define hippocras as a medicinal cordial.
Q 09In which city of Thessaly did Hippocrates probably die?
Larissa
Larissa lay far from his island birthplace because he spent his life travelling to teach and practise; accounts of his age at death range from his eighties to well over 100.
Q 10Where does Dante place Hippocrates in the Divine Comedy?
In Limbo, among the virtuous pagans
In Limbo, among the virtuous pagans, Dante sees Hippocrates beside Euclid and Ptolemy: great minds who died unbaptised, spared torment but shut out of Heaven.
Q 11What were the four humours in Hippocratic medicine?
Blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile
Blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile were the four humours; illness meant an excess or a shortage of one, an idea that dominated Western medicine for some two thousand years.
Q 12Which disease's attacks, returning every third or fourth day, were classified in the Hippocratic writings?
Malaria
Malaria lay behind the 'tertian' and 'quartan' attacks the Hippocratic writers logged, named for the day on which they came back; it took another two thousand years and more to prove that mosquitoes spread it.
Q 13Why did Greek medicine in Hippocrates's time know almost nothing of anatomy?
Q 21Hippocrates is described as the first documented surgeon of which part of the body?
The chest
Hippocrates is called the first documented chest surgeon: the Corpus describes draining an empyema by cutting between the ribs and inserting a metal tube, the principle of later chest-drain surgery.
Q 22Which condition, long called the 'sacred disease', did a Hippocratic treatise insist had a natural cause?
Epilepsy
Epilepsy was the 'sacred disease'; the treatise traced it to phlegm blocking the brain and argued that no god had sent it, since prayers and incantations had never cured anyone.
Q 23Which famous 'Hippocratic' saying is probably a misquotation?
A taboo forbade dissecting humans
A taboo forbade dissecting humans, so Hippocratic writers blurred arteries, veins and nerves together and spoke of the muscles simply as 'flesh'.
Q 14In Hippocratic medicine, what was a 'crisis'?
The turning point of an illness
The turning point of an illness was its crisis: the patient either began to recover or sank towards death, and doctors expected it on set 'critical days' counted from the onset.
Q 15What Latin phrase sums up the Hippocratic idea that the body can heal itself?
Vis medicatrix naturae
Vis medicatrix naturae, 'the healing power of nature', expresses the Hippocratic belief that the body rebalances itself; treatment aimed to ease that process with rest and immobilisation.
Q 16What mixture did Hippocrates prescribe as a generalised treatment?
Honey and vinegar
Honey and vinegar, mixed as oxymel, suited a doctor wary of strong drugs that might be wrongly chosen; the treatise on regimen in acute diseases even says to serve it hot in winter and cold in summer.
Q 17Which folk saying about food is sometimes traced to Hippocrates?
'Feed a cold, starve a fever'
'Feed a cold, starve a fever' is often traced to Hippocratic advice that fasting helped fever patients, fever then being regarded as a disease in itself rather than a symptom.
Q 18What device named after Hippocrates used tension to set broken bones?
The Hippocratic bench
The Hippocratic bench, or scamnum, used ropes and a windlass to stretch a limb or the spine so that fractures and dislocations could be set, an ancestor of modern orthopaedic traction.
Q 19What diagnostic sign of chronic lung disease is Hippocrates credited with first describing?
Clubbing of the fingers
Clubbing of the fingers has been read as a sign of serious disease since Hippocrates's day, which is why doctors still call bulbous fingertips 'Hippocratic fingers'.
Q 20Shakespeare alludes to the 'Hippocratic face' of a dying person when describing whose death in Henry V?
Falstaff
Falstaff's death is reported by Mistress Quickly in Henry V ('his nose was as sharp as a pen'), echoing the Hippocratic face, the pinched look of the dying described in Prognostics.
'Let food be thy medicine'
'Let food be thy medicine' appears nowhere in the Hippocratic writings and its true origin is unknown; the same goes for 'Walking is man's best medicine', another line often pinned on him.
Q 24Which Hippocratic work opens with the words 'Life is short, and Art long'?
Aphorisms
Aphorisms begins with the line, which goes on 'the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult'; later translators turned it round into the motto 'Ars longa, vita brevis'.
Q 25In which city were anonymous medical works probably gathered under Hippocrates's name?
Alexandria
Alexandria's library collected the medical prose of earlier centuries, and a librarian there may have filed it all under Hippocrates because of his fame; the works were written by many hands.
Q 26Which of these is a genuine treatise in the Hippocratic Corpus?
On Airs, Waters and Places
On Airs, Waters and Places is a genuine Hippocratic work: it tells a doctor arriving in a strange town to study its winds, its water and how it lies to the sun; the other titles belong to a philosopher and a Roman poet.
Q 27Which two principles of medical ethics does the Hippocratic Oath establish?
Confidentiality and non-maleficence
Confidentiality and non-maleficence both come from the Oath, which vows to keep secret what is seen in practice and to keep patients from harm; few schools still use the original wording, preferring modern rewrites.
Q 28Which woman gives her name to an 1893 pledge modelled on the Hippocratic Oath?
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale never wrote it: Lystra Gretter and a committee at a Detroit nursing school composed the pledge and named it as a token of esteem for the founder of modern nursing.
Q 29Which practice does the original Hippocratic Oath tell doctors to leave to other craftsmen?
Using the knife
Using the knife is renounced in the Oath, 'not even on sufferers from stone'; the vow is a puzzle, because other Hippocratic works give detailed instructions for surgery.
Q 30What modern medical oath did the World Medical Association draft in 1948?
The Declaration of Geneva
The Declaration of Geneva was drafted in the shadow of wartime medical crimes, as a modern doctor's pledge to stand in for the ancient oath; it has been amended several times since.