Medical History Trivia
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This medical history trivia quiz has 59 free questions with answers and walks through 4,000 years of healing, from the Edwin Smith Papyrus and the surgeon Sushruta to Hippocrates and Galen, Avicenna's Canon, the barber-surgeons, Vesalius and Harvey, and then the great 19th- and 20th-century breakthroughs: Jenner's smallpox vaccine, ether at Massachusetts General, Semmelweis and handwashing, John Snow's pump handle, Lister's carbolic acid, Pasteur and Koch, Röntgen's X-rays, insulin, penicillin, the polio vaccine, the first kidney and heart transplants and the first IVF baby. The easy questions are ones most people know (who is called the father of medicine, what Fleming found growing in a petri dish). The medium ones cover the milestones and the people behind them. The hard ones ask about the details: the boy Jenner inoculated, the magazine-worthy bet over ulcers, the pole outside the barber's shop, the queen who took chloroform. Good for medical and nursing students, pub quizzes and anyone who has ever wondered why doctors wash their hands. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
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Q 01Which Greek physician from Kos is called the "Father of Medicine"?
Hippocrates
Hippocrates, born on Kos around 460 BC, is traditionally called the Father of Medicine, yet most of the sixty or so works that carry his name were probably written by others.
Q 02The four humours were blood, phlegm and two kinds of which fluid?
Bile
Bile came in two kinds, yellow and black; too much black bile was blamed for gloom, which is why 'melancholy' comes from the Greek for black bile.
Q 03Before serving Rome's emperors, Galen learned to treat severe wounds as chief physician to whom in Pergamon?
Gladiators
Gladiators: from 157 Galen patched up the troop kept by Pergamon's high priest, a rare look inside living bodies at a time when Roman custom barred human dissection, before he moved to Rome and the emperors' court.
Q 04Who compiled The Canon of Medicine, the 11th-century encyclopaedia that Europe's medical schools taught from for centuries?
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
Ibn Sina (Avicenna) made the Canon so central to Europe's medical teaching that the rebel doctor Paracelsus is said to have burned a copy in public in 1527.
Q 05The oldest known surgical treatise on trauma, written around 1600 BC, comes from which civilisation?
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt: the Edwin Smith Papyrus, thought to copy a far older text, works through injuries from the head downward with an examination, diagnosis and outlook for each, where other medical papyri lean on spells.
Q 06Sushruta is called the father of plastic surgery largely for describing which operation?
Rebuilding a cut-off nose
Rebuilding a cut-off nose: the Sushruta Samhita describes shaping a new one from a flap of the patient's own skin, an operation in demand because noses were cut off as a punishment.
Q 07Trepanning, one of the oldest surgical procedures known, involves doing what?
Drilling a hole in the skull
Drilling a hole in the skull is trepanning, from the Greek trypanon, a borer; healed trepanned skulls from the Neolithic show many patients survived the operation.
Q 08At which university was Vesalius a professor when he wrote De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543)?
Padua
Vesalius taught anatomy at Padua from 1537, basing the Fabrica on his own dissections; he then left to become physician to Emperor Charles V.
Q 09William Harvey's 1628 book De Motu Cordis was the first to describe in full what?
The circulation of the blood
The circulation of the blood: Harvey measured how much the heart pumps and showed it was far more than the body could make afresh each hour, so the same blood had to be going round and round.
Q 10Ambroise Paré found gunshot wounds healed better with an egg-yolk ointment than with what standard treatment?
Boiling oil
Boiling oil was poured into gunshot wounds, then thought to be poisoned; when Paré's supply ran out on campaign he dressed the rest with egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine, and found them healing better.
Q 11The red and white stripes of a barber's pole recall which practice once carried out by barber-surgeons?
Bloodletting
Bloodletting was a barber-surgeon's trade: the red stripe stands for blood and the white for bandages, and the pole itself is said to recall the stick patients gripped to make their veins stand out.
Q 12Which US president asked to be bled for a throat infection, a treatment that likely hastened his death?
George Washington
George Washington woke with a swollen throat in December 1799 and had his overseer bleed him before any doctor arrived; his physicians went on bleeding him through the day, and he died that night.
Q 13In 1796 Edward Jenner tested his new vaccine on James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his what?
Gardener
Q 21Which chemical did Joseph Lister use to pioneer antiseptic surgery at Glasgow Royal Infirmary?
Carbolic acid
Carbolic acid was already used to deodorise sewage, which gave Lister the idea of trying it on wounds in 1865; the mouthwash Listerine was later named after him.
Q 22Pasteur gave his rabies vaccine to nine-year-old Joseph Meister in 1885 after the boy had been what?
Bitten by a rabid dog
Bitten by a rabid dog in Alsace, Meister reached Paris on 6 July 1885; Pasteur, who was no licensed doctor, had a physician give the boy 13 injections, and he never developed rabies.
Q 23Robert Koch helped found bacteriology in 1876 by proving that a bacterium causes which disease of farm animals?
Anthrax
Gardener: on 14 May 1796 Jenner inoculated James Phipps, his gardener's son, with matter from a pox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes's hand, then tried to give the boy the real disease, without effect.
Q 14The word "vaccine" derives from the Latin for which animal?
Cow
Cow: the Latin is vacca; Jenner named cowpox variolae vaccinae in 1798, and Pasteur later stretched 'vaccine' to cover every such inoculation in Jenner's honour.
Q 15Which disease did the WHO declare eradicated in 1980?
Smallpox
Smallpox: the last natural case was in Somalia in 1977, yet the final cases came a year later, when the virus escaped from a laboratory in England.
Q 16William Morton, who first publicly demonstrated ether anaesthesia in 1846, was by profession a what?
Dentist
Dentist William Morton had used ether to extract a tooth painlessly from Ebenezer Frost on 30 September 1846 before the public demonstration at Massachusetts General Hospital on 16 October.
Q 17Which Scottish obstetrician first demonstrated chloroform anaesthesia in humans in 1847?
James Young Simpson
James Young Simpson tried chloroform on himself and two assistants at his Edinburgh home in November 1847, and before the year was out he was using it to ease childbirth.
Q 18Which monarch was given chloroform by John Snow during the births of her last two children in the 1850s?
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria received chloroform from John Snow for the births of Prince Leopold in 1853 and Princess Beatrice in 1857, and her approval made anaesthesia in childbirth respectable.
Q 19Where was the public water pump John Snow had disabled during the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak?
Broad Street
Broad Street's pump lost its handle the day after Snow took his findings to the parish board; the well was later found to lie a few feet from a leaking cesspit.
Q 20In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis cut deaths on his maternity ward by making doctors do what?
Wash their hands in chlorinated lime
Wash their hands in chlorinated lime, Semmelweis ordered, and deaths on his ward fell from about 18 percent to under 2; most colleagues still rejected his findings, and he died in an asylum in 1865.
Anthrax: working at home, Koch infected mice with the bacillus taken from dead farm animals and traced its life cycle; he went on to find the tuberculosis and cholera germs.
Q 24Emil von Behring won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for a blood-serum cure for which childhood disease?
Diphtheria
Diphtheria: Behring found that blood serum from an animal immunised against the toxin could cure an infected one, and by 1900 horses were being used to make the antitoxin.
Q 25René Laennec made the first stethoscope in 1816 after listening to a young woman's heart through what?
A rolled-up tube of paper
A rolled-up tube of paper let Laennec hear her heart more clearly than his bare ear ever had, and spared him pressing his head to her chest; he then built the idea into a hollow wooden tube.
Q 26Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895, received which award in 1901?
The first Nobel Prize in Physics
The first Nobel Prize in Physics went to Röntgen in 1901 for the rays he found in his Würzburg laboratory; he never patented X-rays, wanting everyone to benefit from them.
Q 27Which scientist developed mobile X-ray units for French field hospitals in the First World War?
Marie Curie
Marie Curie, physics laureate in 1903 and chemistry laureate in 1911, equipped some 20 mobile X-ray vans nicknamed 'petites Curies' and drove one to the front herself.
Q 28Which blood factor, the 'positive' or 'negative' in a blood type, did Karl Landsteiner identify with Alexander Wiener?
The Rhesus factor
The Rhesus factor takes its name from the rhesus monkeys whose blood was used in the tests; a mismatch between mother and baby turned out to explain a deadly anaemia of newborns.
Q 29Willem Einthoven won the 1924 Nobel Prize for developing which heart device?
The electrocardiograph
The electrocardiograph grew from Einthoven's string galvanometer, built because the earlier electrometer was so sluggish that every tracing needed mathematical correction; his wave labels P, Q, R, S and T are still used.
Q 30Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin in 1921 at which university?
Toronto
At the University of Toronto, in J.J.R. Macleod's lab, Banting and Best extracted insulin in summer 1921; Banting shared his 1923 Nobel money with Best, whom the committee had passed over.