Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
This medicine trivia quiz has 99 free questions with answers and starts gently and then gets genuinely hard. The opening questions are the ones every medical student knows: the father of medicine, the stethoscope, the first vaccine, the discovery of penicillin and X-rays. After that it turns to the stories doctors tell each other: the surgeon who threaded a catheter into his own heart and walked to the X-ray room to prove it, the Australian who drank a flask of bacteria to settle the ulcer debate, the FDA reviewer who kept thalidomide out of America, and the railroad foreman who survived an iron rod through his skull. It suits nurses, medical students, pre-meds and anyone who wants a medical round with real teeth for a pub quiz or a break-room competition. Difficulty is marked on every question, so you can tell the warm-ups from the stumpers. Every answer has been checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source, and each question shows its citation and a short explanation once you have answered.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which ancient Greek physician is widely regarded as the 'Father of Medicine'?
Hippocrates
Hippocrates, born around 460 BC on the island of Kos, is credited with separating the practice of medicine from magic and superstition, advocating for observation and a scientific approach to disease.
Q 02What is the study of the body's structure called, from the Greek for 'dissection'?
Anatomy
Anatomy is the study of the body's structure. The Greek anatomē means 'dissection', from a verb meaning 'to cut up', because the subject was learned by dissecting bodies.
Q 03Which French physician invented the stethoscope in 1816 while working at the Hôpital Necker in Paris?
René Laennec
René Laennec pioneered listening to the chest to diagnose disease, a practice the stethoscope made routine.
Q 04What is the outermost layer of the human skin called?
Epidermis
The epidermis sits over the dermis and hypodermis, keeping infection out and regulating water loss from the body.
Q 05Which organ, the largest inside the body, both detoxifies your blood and makes the bile that breaks down fat?
Liver
The liver handles over 500 jobs. Its bile is an alkaline fluid of cholesterol and bile acids that emulsifies dietary fat.
Q 06Which imaging technique uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to picture soft tissue, with no ionising radiation?
MRI
MRI nudges the body's hydrogen atoms with radio waves inside a strong magnetic field and reads the signals back, which is what separates it from CT and PET scans.
Q 07Edward Jenner's pioneering vaccine, the world's first, targeted which disease?
Smallpox
Smallpox, the target of that first vaccine, has since been eradicated worldwide.
Q 08Which is the largest artery in the human body?
Aorta
The aorta branches upwards immediately after leaving the heart, then descends to the abdomen, where it forks into the two common iliac arteries.
Q 09What does a doctor mean by hypertension?
High blood pressure
Hypertension means high blood pressure: persistently elevated pressure in the arteries, which forces the heart to work harder with every beat and damages blood vessels over time.
Q 10Which Scottish physician discovered penicillin in 1928, as a crude extract of a Penicillium mould?
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming only coined the name penicillin on 7 March 1929, on realising the mould had antibacterial properties.
Q 11Which hormone did Banting and Best first isolate in Toronto in 1921?
Insulin
Insulin. Banting's idea was to tie off the pancreatic duct so the enzyme-making tissue withered while the islets of Langerhans survived, letting him and Best extract insulin from dog pancreases in 1921.
Q 12Which German physicist at Wurzburg in 1895 produced the radiation that bears his name in many languages?
Wilhelm Rontgen
Wilhelm Rontgen discovered X-rays at Würzburg in November 1895; German and several other languages call them Röntgen rays. He received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901, and element 111, roentgenium, honours him.
Q 13Which South African surgeon carried out the world's first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967?
Q 21Which German bacteriologist identified the agents of TB, cholera and anthrax and set four postulates?
Robert Koch
Robert Koch announced the tuberculosis bacillus on 24 March 1882, a date marked as World TB Day. His four postulates for linking a microbe to a disease, set out in 1890, became a foundation of microbiology.
Q 22Whose 1543 De humani corporis fabrica earned him the title of founder of modern anatomy?
Andreas Vesalius
Andreas Vesalius was 28 when the Fabrica appeared in Basel in 1543; its woodcuts came from Titian's workshop in Venice. Its dissection-based drawings overturned errors Galen had carried over from animal anatomy.
Q 23Paul Ehrlich's Salvarsan (1910) was the first effective medicinal treatment for which disease?
Christiaan Barnard
Christiaan Barnard performed the operation at Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, on 3 December 1967. The recipient, Louis Washkansky, regained consciousness and could talk but died 18 days later of pneumonia, his immune system suppressed by anti-rejection drugs.
Q 14What had Karl Landsteiner found in 1901 when he noticed samples from two people clump together on contact?
The blood groups
He had discovered the blood groups: the clumping came from agglutinins in the serum, and he labelled the three groups he found A, B and C, the last later renamed O. AB was identified a year later by his colleagues.
Q 15Which Hungarian physician cut maternal deaths in Vienna in 1847 by making doctors wash their hands?
Ignaz Semmelweis
Ignaz Semmelweis, working in Vienna's maternity clinic, cut deaths from puerperal fever by making doctors wash in chlorinated lime. Colleagues rejected the idea; he died in an asylum in 1865, two weeks after a beating by guards.
Q 16Whose 1628 treatise De Motu Cordis first described in full how the heart pumps blood around the body?
William Harvey
William Harvey, physician to James I and Charles I, showed that the heart pumps blood in a continuous circuit. He could not see the capillaries linking arteries to veins; Marcello Malpighi found them with a microscope in 1661.
Q 17Who was the first human given Louis Pasteur's rabies vaccine, on 6 July 1885?
A 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister
The boy received thirteen inoculations over eleven days after being mauled by a rabid dog and survived. He later worked as caretaker of the Pasteur Institute for decades.
Q 18Which substance did Joseph Lister introduce in the 1860s to sterilise instruments, wounds and hands?
Carbolic acid
Carbolic acid is what chemists now call phenol; Lister got the idea from its use to deodorise sewage. Listerine mouthwash was later named in his honour, though he had nothing to do with it.
Q 19What operation was performed at Morton's 1846 public demonstration of ether anaesthesia?
Removal of a neck tumour
The patient was Edward Gilbert Abbott, and the operating theatre is now preserved as the Ether Dome. Morton, a dentist, spent years afterwards fighting over credit and money for the discovery.
Q 20What did Barry Marshall famously do in 1984 to prove a bacterium, not stress, caused stomach ulcers?
Drank a broth of cultured Helicobacter pylori
Marshall drank a broth of cultured Helicobacter pylori taken from a patient and developed gastritis within days, satisfying Koch's postulates. He and Robin Warren shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Syphilis
Salvarsan, an arsenic compound, was the first effective drug against syphilis; it was number 606 in Ehrlich's screening programme, hence its early nickname. Ehrlich called a drug that kills only its target a Zauberkugel, or magic bullet.
Q 24What passed through railroad foreman Phineas Gage's skull in an 1848 accident in Cavendish, Vermont?
A metre-long tamping iron
The rod entered below his left cheekbone and exited through the top of his head, and he survived another eleven years. The iron is on display at Harvard's Warren Anatomical Museum.
Q 25What is the maximum possible Apgar score for a newborn?
10
Each of appearance, pulse, grimace, activity and respiration scores 0 to 2, giving a maximum of 10; babies are checked at one and five minutes after birth. The criteria spell Virginia Apgar's surname, a backronym coined a decade later.
Q 26On the Glasgow Coma Scale, published in 1974 by Teasdale and Jennett, what is the lowest possible score?
3
Eye, verbal and motor responses each score at least 1, so even a completely unresponsive patient scores 3. A fully alert patient scores 15.
Q 27In which country was the last natural case of smallpox recorded, in 1977?
Somalia
Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia, fell ill in October 1977, recovered, and later spent years as a polio vaccination volunteer. Two laboratory-linked cases in Birmingham, England, followed in 1978.
Q 28The Rh factor in blood typing takes its name from which animal used in the original experiments?
A rhesus monkey
Landsteiner and Wiener found the antigen in 1937 by injecting rhesus monkey red cells into rabbits, hence 'Rh'. The human antigen later proved different from the monkey one, but the name stuck; about 15% of Europeans are Rh-negative.
Q 29Broca's area, linked to speech production, sits in which lobe of the brain, usually in the left hemisphere?
Frontal
Paul Broca located the region in the left frontal lobe in 1861 through patient Louis Victor Leborgne, known as 'Tan' because that syllable was all he could say. Leborgne's brain was preserved in a Paris museum.
Q 30FDA reviewer Frances Oldham Kelsey was honoured by JFK in 1962 for refusing to approve which drug?
Thalidomide
Kelsey withheld approval of thalidomide, pressing its US licensee for safety data it could not supply, so America was largely spared the birth-defect tragedy seen in Europe; JFK gave her the President's Award in August 1962.