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Milestones in Medicine
Anaesthesia, antisepsis, germ theory and insulin all arrived within a single lifetime, and most of them met resistance first. Ten milestones and the names attached to them.
About this topic
Medicine spent most of its history without any reliable way to tell whether a treatment worked. What changed that, between roughly 1840 and 1930, was a run of discoveries that could be demonstrated rather than argued: ether stopped patients feeling a surgeon's knife, carbolic acid stopped wounds turning septic, and a microscope showed the organisms responsible for diseases that had been blamed on bad air. The pattern in these stories is how long the resistance lasted. Semmelweis was dismissed from his post for insisting doctors wash their hands. Lister spent years arguing with British surgeons who saw no reason to change. The ideas that look obvious in hindsight are usually the ones that took a generation to land.
Questions & answers
Milestones in Medicine: all 10 questions and answers
Every question in this quiz is listed below with its correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Play first if you would rather not see the answers — or read through as a study sheet.
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1Who discovered X-rays in 1895?
- A Henri Becquerel
- B Marie Curie
- C Nikola Tesla
- D Wilhelm Röntgen Correct
Answer: D. Wilhelm Röntgen
Why: Röntgen noticed a screen glowing on the other side of his darkened laboratory and named the unknown radiation "X". He took the first Nobel Prize in Physics for it in 1901 and refused to patent the discovery.
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2Which surgeon introduced antiseptic surgery using carbolic acid?
- A John Snow
- B Ambroise Paré
- C Joseph Lister Correct
- D Ignaz Semmelweis
Answer: C. Joseph Lister
Why: Lister began treating wounds and instruments with carbolic acid in the 1860s after reading Pasteur on microbes, and deaths after operations in his wards fell sharply. Semmelweis had shown much the same thing with handwashing two decades earlier and was ignored.
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3Who traced an 1854 cholera outbreak in London to a single water pump?
- A Edwin Chadwick
- B John Snow Correct
- C Louis Pasteur
- D Robert Koch
Answer: B. John Snow
Why: Snow mapped cases around Broad Street in Soho and argued the disease travelled in water rather than in bad air. That map is now treated as a founding document of epidemiology.
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4Who identified the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis and anthrax?
- A Robert Koch Correct
- B Louis Pasteur
- C Paul Ehrlich
- D Joseph Lister
Answer: A. Robert Koch
Why: Koch isolated the tuberculosis bacillus in 1882 and won the Nobel Prize in 1905. He also set out the rules, still known as Koch's postulates, for proving that a particular microbe causes a particular disease.
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5Who performed the first human-to-human heart transplant, in 1967?
- A Michael DeBakey
- B Norman Shumway
- C Denton Cooley
- D Christiaan Barnard Correct
Answer: D. Christiaan Barnard
Why: Barnard operated in Cape Town in December 1967 and the patient survived eighteen days. Much of the surgical technique had been developed by Norman Shumway in California, who was working towards the same operation.
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6Insulin was first isolated and given to patients at which university?
- A University of Cambridge
- B Harvard University
- C University of Toronto Correct
- D Johns Hopkins University
Answer: C. University of Toronto
Why: Frederick Banting and Charles Best, working with J.J.R. Macleod and James Collip, produced a usable extract in Toronto in 1921 and 1922. Banting and Macleod won the Nobel Prize and each split their share of the money with the colleague who had been left out.
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7Which anaesthetic was publicly demonstrated for surgery in Boston in 1846?
- A Cocaine
- B Ether Correct
- C Nitrous oxide
- D Chloroform
Answer: B. Ether
Why: William Morton gave ether to a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital in a room still known as the Ether Dome. Nitrous oxide had been demonstrated in the same hospital the year before and had gone badly enough to set the idea back.
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8Who developed the first widely used polio vaccine, an injected killed-virus version?
- A Jonas Salk Correct
- B Albert Sabin
- C John Enders
- D Hilary Koprowski
Answer: A. Jonas Salk
Why: Salk's injected vaccine was declared safe and effective in 1955 after an enormous field trial. Sabin's oral version, using weakened live virus, followed a few years later and became the mainstay of global eradication campaigns.
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9Who was the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States?
- A Clara Barton
- B Florence Nightingale
- C Rebecca Lee Crumpler
- D Elizabeth Blackwell Correct
Answer: D. Elizabeth Blackwell
Why: Blackwell graduated top of her class at Geneva Medical College in New York in 1849, having been admitted after the male students voted her in as a joke. Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first Black woman to earn an American medical degree in 1864.
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10Whose X-ray diffraction images were central to working out the structure of DNA?
- A Dorothy Hodgkin
- B Gertrude Elion
- C Rosalind Franklin Correct
- D Barbara McClintock
Answer: C. Rosalind Franklin
Why: Franklin's image known as Photo 51, taken at King's College London, showed the helical pattern that Watson and Crick built their 1953 model around. Dorothy Hodgkin, working in the same field, determined the structures of penicillin and vitamin B12.
Frequently asked questions about Milestones in Medicine
How many questions are in Milestones in Medicine?
Milestones in Medicine has 10 questions and takes about 8 minutes to finish. It is rated Hard and sits in our Medicine & The Body category.
How is Milestones in Medicine scored?
Each of the 10 correct answers adds 10 XP, up to 100 XP for a clean run. Wrong answers cost you nothing, and your full question-by-question review is shown at the end.
Are the answers to Milestones in Medicine explained?
Yes. All 10 questions carry a written explanation of why the correct answer is right, so the quiz works as a study sheet as well as a test.
Can I replay Milestones in Medicine?
Yes, as often as you like. The questions and the answer options are reshuffled on each run, and you can use Practice Mistakes afterwards to retry only the ones you missed. No account is needed to play.
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