Medical Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
8correct to beat the crowd
198 free Medical trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This medical trivia quiz covers the practice of medicine as most people meet it: the diseases and what causes them, the drugs in the cabinet, the specialties on the hospital directory, the gadgets doctors use, the great institutions and charities, and the Greek and Latin behind the words. The easy questions are ones anyone who has been to a GP can answer: which snake-and-staff symbol is the correct one, what the Rx on a prescription means, what a placebo is and which vitamin scurvy lacks. From there it gets harder: Sertürner naming morphine after the god of dreams, warfarin's start as rat poison, Viagra's origins as an angina drug, Botox as the deadliest natural substance, the 100-day cough, the disease of kings, Landsteiner's A/B/C, Riva-Rocci's cuff, the first implanted pacemaker in Solna, the Apgar and Glasgow scores, the ICRC's three Nobel Prizes, MSF and Biafra, the NHS's launch at Park Hospital, and why the caduceus is the wrong symbol. If you want the great discoveries and their discoverers, our Medical History quiz covers Jenner to Barnard; for anatomy, try our Human Body quiz. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the diseases, drugs, devices, specialties and organisations named before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question.
30 of 198 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which emblem, often confused with the caduceus, is the true symbol of medicine?
Rod of Asclepius
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.
Q 02The caduceus, wrongly used as a medical symbol, is traditionally the symbol of which god?
Hermes
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.
Q 03Where in Greece was Hippocrates born?
Kos
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.
Q 04Which maxim is wrongly credited to the Hippocratic Oath?
First, do no harm
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.
Q 05What does the Latin word 'placebo' mean?
I shall be pleasing
'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.
Q 06What is an inert treatment called when the patient expects it to do harm?
Nocebo
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.
Q 07Aspirin's precursor salicin comes from the bark of which tree?
Willow
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.
Q 08Which company was selling Aspirin globally by 1899?
Bayer
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.
Q 09Children with viral infections are not given aspirin because of the risk of which condition?
Reye syndrome
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.
Q 10Paracetamol is sold in the US under which brand name?
Tylenol
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.
Q 11Ibuprofen was discovered in 1961 by researchers at which British company?
Boots the Chemists
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.
Q 12Friedrich Sertürner named the opium alkaloid he isolated in 1804 after which Greek god?
Morpheus, god of dreams
Morphine takes its name from Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, for its sleep-inducing effect; Friedrich Sertürner isolated it from opium in 1804.
Q 13Statins lower cholesterol by inhibiting which enzyme?
HMG-CoA reductase
Q 21The word insulin comes from the Latin for what?
Island
Insulin comes from the Latin insula, 'island', because it is secreted by the islets of Langerhans, tiny clusters of hormone-making cells.
Q 22Which first-line diabetes drug descends from goat's rue, a plant long used in European folk medicine?
Metformin
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.
Q 23Which now-everyday medical word did soil microbiologist Selman Waksman introduce in the early 1940s?
Antibiotic
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.
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.
Q 14Which blood thinner first went on sale in 1948 as a rat poison?
Warfarin
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.
Q 15Which US president was given a new blood thinner after a heart attack in office?
Dwight Eisenhower
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.
Q 16Which drug did Pfizer develop as an angina treatment before trial volunteers reported a surprising side effect?
Viagra
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.
Q 17Which bacterium makes one of the deadliest toxins known, injected in tiny doses to smooth wrinkles?
Clostridium botulinum
Clostridium botulinum makes botulinum toxin, sold heavily diluted as Botox; its first approval, in 1989, was for crossed eyes and eyelid spasms, not wrinkles.
Q 18Botulism was first traced, in early-1800s Germany, to poisoning from which food?
Blood sausage
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.
Q 19Epinephrine, the fight-or-flight hormone, is produced mainly by which glands?
Adrenal 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.
Q 20Penicillin was so scarce in 1941 that doctors recovered it from which bodily fluid of treated patients?
Urine
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.
Q 24Which ambassador's wife brought smallpox inoculation from Turkey to Britain in 1721?
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
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.
Q 25Which form of diabetes is the most common?
Type 2
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.
Q 26The word 'asthma' comes from a Greek word meaning what?
Panting
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.
Q 27Which common condition is nicknamed 'the silent killer' because it rarely causes symptoms?
Hypertension
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.
Q 28What is the most common cause of a heart attack?
Rupture of an atherosclerotic plaque
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.
Q 29What is a stroke whose symptoms last less than 24 hours called?
A transient ischemic attack
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.
Q 30The disease name 'cancer' is the Latin word for which animal?
Crab
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.