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This nursing trivia quiz has 70 free questions with answers and covers the whole profession: the Crimean War hospital at Scutari, the school Florence Nightingale opened at St Thomas' in 1860, Mary Seacole's British Hotel, Clara Barton on the battlefield, and the first professionally trained nurses in the United States. There are rounds on the theorists every nursing student meets (Henderson, Peplau, Orem, Watson, Leininger, Benner), on the Army, Navy and Cadet Nurse Corps, and on the tools of the trade, from Laennec's rolled-up paper tube to the Riva-Rocci cuff. Lighter questions cover nurses on screen (Nurse Jackie, Nurse Ratched, Call the Midwife, Margaret Houlihan), the history of the cap and the pin, Nightingale's pet owl, and why Nurses Week always ends on May 12. It suits a Nurses Week party, a unit break-room challenge, a nursing school icebreaker or a solo test of your history-of-medicine knowledge. Every answer has been checked against a primary source such as Wikipedia, the American Nurses Association or Gallup, and each question shows exactly where it came from.
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Q 01Which newspaper's report coined Florence Nightingale's nickname 'The Lady with the Lamp'?
The Times
Longfellow's 1857 poem 'Santa Filomena' then fixed the image in the public mind, and a lamp still appears on many nursing school pins.
Q 02Nightingale's Scutari hospital, reached in 1854, lies in which modern city?
Istanbul
The hospital sat on the Asian side of the Bosporus, opposite Constantinople; in her first winter there 4,077 British soldiers died, most from disease rather than wounds.
Q 03Nightingale's 1859 nursing classic is titled 'Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is ___'?
Not
The whole book runs just 76 pages, and Nightingale insisted in the preface it was meant only to give 'hints for thought' rather than serve as a rulebook.
Q 04Where did Nightingale open the first nurse training school on 9 July 1860?
St Thomas' Hospital
The school was paid for by the Nightingale Fund, a public subscription that had raised £45,000 in gratitude for her Crimean work.
Q 05What did Florence Nightingale call her compilation of polar-area charts of Crimean army deaths?
A coxcomb
The chart is now known as a polar area diagram or Nightingale rose; the term she coined for the set was later applied to each individual chart.
Q 06In 1859 Nightingale became the first woman elected to which learned body?
The Royal Statistical Society
Her data work impressed statisticians so much that she was later made an honorary member of the American Statistical Association too.
Q 07What did Nightingale name the juvenile owl she rescued in Greece and kept as a pet?
Athena
The little owl travelled in her pocket and, after it died, was stuffed; it is still displayed at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London.
Q 08In 1907 Nightingale became the first woman to receive which British honour?
The Order of Merit
She was 87 and largely bedridden by then; she died three years later at 90, having declined a state funeral in Westminster Abbey.
Q 09In which US city was the Nightingale Pledge written in 1893 by Lystra Gretter and a committee?
Detroit
It is a modified Hippocratic Oath, and Gretter's 1935 revision added a vow to become a 'missioner of health', widening the nurse's job beyond the bedside.
Q 10Which Jamaican-born nurse opened the 'British Hotel' near Balaclava to feed and treat Crimean War officers?
Mary Seacole
Her 1857 memoir 'Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands' was the first autobiography written by a Black woman in Britain, and in 2004 she topped a poll of 100 Great Black Britons.
Q 11Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, was born on which holiday in 1821?
Christmas Day
Before the Civil War she was a teacher and one of the first women to hold a substantial clerkship at the US Patent Office.
Q 12After which 1862 battle did Clara Barton earn the nickname 'Angel of the Battlefield'?
Cedar Mountain
After the war she ran the Office of Missing Soldiers in Washington, whose staff answered 41,855 letters and helped locate more than 22,000 missing men.
Q 13Union nursing superintendent Dorothea Dix required female volunteers to be 'plain-looking' and within which age range?
35 to 50
Q 21Madeleine Leininger developed which concept, arguing that care must fit a patient's cultural values and 'lifeways'?
Transcultural nursing
Her Culture Care theory, first published in 1961, is often taught with her 'Sunrise' model diagram of the factors that shape a patient's care.
Q 22Patricia Benner's 1984 book 'From Novice to Expert' applied whose skill-acquisition framework to nursing?
The Dreyfus model
The result was a five-stage path from novice to expert; a 1989 revision with Judith Wrubel folded in the philosophy of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.
Q 23Why does US National Nurses Week end on May 12?
Florence Nightingale's birthday
Recruits also had to wear plain uniforms with no jewellery or cosmetics; Dix is better remembered for her crusade to build humane asylums for the mentally ill.
Q 14Which American poet worked in the army paymaster's office so he could nurse in Civil War hospitals?
Walt Whitman
He wrote about the wards in 'The Great Army of the Sick' (1863) and later in 'Memoranda During the War'; his 1865 collection 'Drum-Taps' grew from the same years.
Q 15Linda Richards, America's first trained nurse, is credited with creating what at New York's Bellevue Hospital?
Individual patient records
Her charting system spread to Britain as well; she later trained under Nightingale in England and helped found Japan's first nurse-training programme in 1885.
Q 16Who became the first African American professionally trained nurse in the United States, in 1879?
Mary Eliza Mahoney
She co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908, and the ANA still gives a biennial award in her name for advancing equal opportunity in nursing.
Q 17Lillian Wald, who coined 'public health nurse', founded which Lower East Side institution in 1893?
Henry Street Settlement
By 1913 the settlement had 92 staff and it eventually became the Visiting Nurse Service of New York; Wald was also first president of the National Organization for Public Health Nursing.
Q 18Which theorist, 'the first lady of nursing', defined nursing as assisting the individual 'sick or well'?
Virginia Henderson
She grouped nursing care into 14 components based on human needs, and one biographer called her written work the 20th-century equivalent of Nightingale's.
Q 19Nursing theorist Hildegard Peplau is known for a middle-range theory of what?
Interpersonal relations
She built on psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan's work and campaigned for genuinely therapeutic rather than custodial care in state mental hospitals.
Q 20Jean Watson's 1979 book is titled 'Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of ___'. What fills the blank?
Caring
The Theory of Human Caring is built around ten 'carative' factors, later reworked as Caritas Processes, and draws on Maslow, Carl Rogers and Teilhard de Chardin.
The ANA fixed the dates permanently in 1993 after first declaring May 6 National Nurses Day in 1982; May 8 within the week is National Student Nurses Day.
Q 24Which US president issued the 1974 proclamation designating a National Nurse Week?
Richard Nixon
The idea had been floated as early as 1953, when Dorothy Sutherland of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare proposed a 'Nurse Day' to President Eisenhower, who did not approve it.
Q 25In which year did the International Council of Nurses fix 12 May as the date for International Nurses Day?
1974
Founded in 1899, the ICN was the first international organisation for health professionals and is headquartered in Geneva.
Q 26The ANA traces its origins to 1896. Under what name was it first organised?
The Nurses Associated Alumnae
Plans were drawn up at the Manhattan Beach Hotel near New York City; the body took the name American Nurses Association in 1911 and is now based in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Q 27In which year did the NCLEX switch from paper-and-pencil to a computerized adaptive testing format?
1994
The exam is owned by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing and now delivered by Pearson VUE; the computer picks each question based on how you answered the last one.
Q 28Roughly how many RNs were employed in the US as of 2023, its largest healthcare occupation?
3.2 million
Their median pay was $86,070, and the World Health Organization still projects a worldwide shortfall of 4.5 million nurses by 2030.
Q 29Which profession topped Gallup's 2001 honesty poll, the only non-nurse winner 1999-2025?
Firefighters
The exception came in the poll taken after the 9/11 attacks; in the December 2025 survey 75% of Americans rated nurses' ethics 'very high' or 'high'.
Q 30Around how many anesthetics did Alice Magaw give at St. Mary's Hospital, Rochester, without a single death?
14,000
In 1899 she became the first nurse anesthetist ever published, with 'Observations in Anesthesia' in the Northwestern Lancet; her secret was open-drop ether combined with talking patients calm.