Medicinal Plants Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Medicinal Plants trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
A surprising share of the pharmacy began as a plant someone chewed, brewed or feared. Willow bark became a painkiller, foxglove became a heart drug, a South American tree bark became the first malaria cure, and a pink flower tested against diabetes turned out to fight leukaemia instead. Behind each one is a chemist with a date, a folk tradition with a claim, and usually a good story. These 50 questions stay on the history of science and botany: which plant yielded which compound, who isolated it and when, where the plant grows, and what Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, the Greek herbals and the Victorian apothecaries said it was for. Herbal-remedy claims appear as claims, not advice, and every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something. Play it if you like your trivia with a dose of chemistry and colonial history, or print it for a science class, a garden club or a pub round.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Oseltamivir, sold as Tamiflu, was first made from shikimic acid extracted from which Chinese spice?
Star anise
Star anise at first supplied all of Tamiflu's shikimic acid, and its low yield was blamed for the drug's 2005 shortage until engineered E. coli began making part of the supply.
Q 02Which flower, screened in the 1950s as a diabetes remedy, instead yielded the cancer drugs vinblastine and vincristine?
Madagascar periwinkle
Madagascar periwinkle extract barely moved lab animals' blood sugar but wiped out their white blood cells, the clue that led Canadian researchers to test it against blood cancers.
Q 03Which cocktail began with British officers in the Raj making their bitter daily antimalarial quinine more palatable?
Gin and tonic
Gin and tonic lost its medical point long ago: US rules cap tonic water's quinine at 83 parts per million, far below the dose once taken against malaria.
Q 04Which opium-derived drug did Bayer sell from 1898 as a 'non-addictive' morphine substitute and cough suppressant?
Heroin
Heroin is said to take its trade name from the German heroisch, 'heroic', and it soon proved far more addictive than Bayer's advertising promised.
Q 05Which South American arrow poison did Montreal anaesthetists give a surgical patient as a muscle relaxant in 1942?
Curare
Curare let Harold Griffith and Enid Johnson relax a patient's muscles during an appendectomy on 23 January 1942, and its main alkaloid is still called tubocurarine after the bamboo tubes it was packed in.
Q 06Belladonna, Italian for 'beautiful woman', is widely claimed to be named for women using its drops to do what?
Dilate their pupils
Dilate their pupils is the popular story, and the plant's atropine really does it: the drug relaxes the muscle that narrows the pupil and is still used in drops before eye examinations.
Q 07Castor-oil seeds yield which protein toxin, blamed for the 1978 London 'umbrella murder' of dissident Georgi Markov?
Ricin
Ricin does not dissolve in oil, so it stays behind in the crushed seed cake, which is why castor oil itself is a non-poisonous laxative.
Q 08Which old idea, named in Jakob Böhme's 1621 book, held that a plant's looks reveal its cure, as walnuts for the head?
Doctrine of signatures
Doctrine of signatures thinking could do real harm: birthwort, long given in pregnancy because the plant was thought to resemble a womb, contains an acid that destroys the kidneys and causes cancer.
Q 09Which plant's root, a Chinese laxative for millennia, once fetched several times the price of opium or saffron?
Rhubarb
Rhubarb's most prized grade was 'Russian rhubarb', valued for the quality-control system the Russian Empire ran on the trade, long before anyone baked the stalks into a pie.
Q 10Which coneflower, a folk medicine of Indigenous North Americans, takes its genus name from the Greek for 'hedgehog'?
Echinacea
Echinacea's spiny name is said to refer to the bristly cone at the flower's centre, and Native Americans used the plant for toothache and coughs.
Q 11Which compound, absent from intact garlic and formed only when the clove is damaged, was first isolated in 1944?
Allicin
Allicin forms within seconds when the enzyme alliinase meets alliin in crushed tissue, which is why garlic releases its sharp smell only once a clove is cut.
Q 12Which yellow-flowered herb, named for a midsummer feast on 24 June, is approved in the EU for mild to moderate depression?
St John's wort
St John's wort blooms around the feast of St John the Baptist, and it speeds the body's breakdown of many medicines, which can make birth control pills and other drugs less effective.
Q 13The opium poppy's Latin species name, somniferum, describes which effect of the dried latex from its seed pods?
Brings sleep
Q 21William Withering's 1785 Account of the Foxglove reported clinical trials of the plant against which swelling illness?
Dropsy
Dropsy is the old name for the fluid build-up, or oedema, that comes with heart failure, and drugs based on the compounds in Withering's foxglove are still prescribed for failing hearts.
Q 22Charles Ledger's high-quinine cinchona seeds, collected in Bolivia in 1865, were grown by the Dutch on which island?
Java
Java's plantations of Ledger's high-quinine strain outcompeted British India's, so Japan's capture of the island in the Second World War cut the Allies off from their main supply of the drug.
Q 23Laudanum, the opium tincture of the Romantic era, grew from the concoctions of which 16th-century Swiss alchemist?
Paracelsus
Brings sleep is the sense of somniferum, yet the same species supplies bakery poppy seeds, which carry enough opiate residue to trigger a positive drug test.
Q 14Which opium alkaloid, first isolated in France in 1832, takes its name from the Greek for 'poppy head'?
Codeine
Codeine was found by Pierre Robiquet while he was refining ways to extract morphine, and the body converts part of each dose back into morphine, which is what dulls the pain.
Q 15Which waxy aromatic solid, an Egyptian embalming ingredient and folk decongestant, comes from an East Asian laurel?
Camphor
Camphor comes from the wood of the camphor laurel, and the early plastics industry used it in immense quantities as the plasticiser that turns nitrocellulose into celluloid.
Q 16Which herb, also known as soldier's woundwort, has a genus name honouring Achilles' care of wounded men?
Yarrow
Yarrow's old folk name nosebleed cut both ways: leaves were packed into the nostril to staunch bleeding, or rolled up and pushed in to start one and ease a headache.
Q 17Aloe vera, the succulent whose gel is sold to soothe sunburn, is thought to be native to which region's Hajar Mountains?
Arabian Peninsula
Arabian Peninsula origins explain its fame: a 2015 DNA study concluded it beat some 500 other aloes to market because it grew near historic trade routes and was traded early.
Q 18Ginseng's genus name Panax, shared by the American and Asian species, comes from an Ancient Greek word meaning what?
All-heal
All-heal is the sense of the Greek panakes, the root of panacea too, and such was the demand that wild American ginseng was overharvested for export and is now traded under CITES controls.
Q 19The '-spir-' in aspirin comes from Spiraea, the old genus of which wetland herb, an early source of salicylic acid?
Meadowsweet
Meadowsweet, then Spiraea ulmaria, gave its name to Spirsäure, the German term for salicylic acid, and Bayer added 'a' for acetyl and '-in' as a typical drug ending.
Q 20Which tree's bitter bark did English clergyman Edward Stone report to the Royal Society in 1763 as a cure for agues?
Willow
Willow bark's extraordinary bitterness reminded Stone of costly Peruvian bark, so he dried and powdered it and tried it on about fifty feverish people, an early step towards aspirin.
Paracelsus's own laudanum was a costly mixture that held pearls as well as opium, and the plain alcohol tincture later sold under the name came from Thomas Sydenham in the 1660s.
Q 24Which gout drug, first isolated in 1820 and still prescribed, is purified from the autumn crocus, or meadow saffron?
Colchicine
Colchicine eases gout by calming the white blood cells that inflame the joint, but the gap between a helpful dose and a poisonous one is narrow, so overdose is a real risk.
Q 25Reserpine, an early antipsychotic and blood-pressure drug, was isolated in 1952 from the dried root of which Indian medicinal plant?
Indian snakeroot
Indian snakeroot's reserpine drains the brain's stores of serotonin and noradrenaline, and the belief that it left patients depressed became a foundation of the chemical theory of depression.
Q 26Percy Julian's 1935 synthesis of the glaucoma drug physostigmine copied a compound from which West African ordeal poison?
Calabar bean
Calabar bean was given to people accused of serious offences in Old Calabar, now in Nigeria: it was held to kill only the guilty, so anyone who survived the dose was declared innocent.
Q 27Warfarin grew out of a Wisconsin lab's hunt for what made cattle bleed to death after eating spoilt hay of which plant?
Sweet clover
Sweet clover's bleeding agent proved to be dicoumarol, and the stronger relative that followed was sold as a rat poison before it reached patients, its name honouring the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
Q 28The cancer drugs etoposide and teniposide derive from podophyllotoxin, found in the rhizome of which American plant?
Mayapple
Mayapple's podophyllotoxin is so toxic that it is used only on the skin, against warts, and chemists had to rework it into less toxic relatives to make the cancer drugs.
Q 29A European patent on a plant fungicide was revoked in 2005 after campaigners showed Indian farmers had long used which tree's oil?
Neem
Neem oil had protected Indian crops for generations, so opponents led by a Green member of the European Parliament persuaded the patent office that the American-owned method involved no inventive step.
Q 30The Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita are founding texts of which traditional system of medicine?
Ayurveda
Ayurveda's Charaka Samhita deals mainly with internal medicine, while the Sushruta Samhita describes surgery in detail, including rebuilding a nose.