Doctor Whodunit? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Elizabeth Blackwell

Elizabeth Blackwell was born in Bristol, England, in 1821. Her family emigrated to America when she was 11 years old. She decided to become a doctor after a female family friend became terminally ill, and asserted she would have gotten better treatment if her doctor had been a female. After several rejected applications she was accepted into Geneva Medical College in New York in 1847, and, despite facing resentment and prejudice from the all male students, became the first woman to receive an MD degree from an American medical school.

She worked between England and America for several years raising awareness of a woman's place in medicine before returning to England permanently in 1869. She continued to campaign for reform and change in the medical profession.

She died in Hastings, England, in 1910.

Answer: Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister was born in Upton near to London in April 1827 to a rich and prosperous Quaker family. His wine merchant father studied science as a hobby and taught Joseph how to use a microscope. Because he was a Quaker, he had to attend a non sectarian college to study medicine and was accepted by University College London Medical School in 1844. After several years of studying he received his medical degree in 1852.

After he became surgeon at the Glasgow Royal infirmary in Scotland he was shocked by how many patients died after surgery and began to experiment with chemicals to clean the patients' wounds and also to clean medical equipment. He was heavily influenced by the French chemist Louis Pasteur.

He found that there was a considerable increase in the rate of survival and he began publishing works on his discoveries, persuading others to use the same methods.

Lister died in 1893 at the age of 87 in Walmer, Kent, England.

Answer: Virginia Apgar

Virginia Apgar was born 1909 and raised in Westfield, New Jersey. Her two older brothers both died in childhood and this is likely to have influenced her decision to become a doctor. In 1937 she graduated from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and then completed a residency in surgery.

Unfortunately she was not able to fulfill her dream in becoming a surgeon and instead was encouraged to study anesthesiology. By 1946 anesthesiology had become acknowledged as a medical specialist and its research became an official academic department at Columbia University. Apgar became the first woman professor at the college. During her time there she introduced her Apgar Scale or Score, which was a way for doctors to assess the health of newborns at 1 and 5 minutes after birth to ascertain if any extra medical intervention was required. The system was developed in 1952 and is still being used today.

Virginia Apgar never married or had children. She died on August 7, 1974.

Answer: Alexander Fleming

Alexander Fleming was born 6th August 1881 in Lochfield, Scotland, the son of a Scottish hill farmer. After winning a scholarship at Kilmarnock Academy in Scotland he moved to London to study at the Royal Polytechnic Institution. In 1903 he enrolled at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington after being encouraged to take up medicine by his elder brother, Tom. In 1906 he qualified as a doctor.

After his degree he began researching substances that kill bacteria while lecturing at St Mary's until 1914 when WWI began, and he signed up for the Royal Army Medical Corps. After the war he returned to St Mary's.

His discovery of penicillin was quite accidental. On returning from holiday he discovered a Petri dish in his laboratory covered in mold and found a substance in the mold had prevented bacteria from growing. He named the substance penicillin. He realised that the substance was effective at killing many different bacteria and began to develop his discovery. In 1941 penicillin was introduced worldwide and has since saved millions of lives.

Fleming was made a Knight Bachelor by King George VI in 1944 and he died on March 11, 1955.

Answer: Christiaan Barnard

Barnard was born in Beaufort West in South Africa on the 8 November 1922. He studied medicine at the University of Cape Town Medical School, and received his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery degrees in 1945. In 1955 he moved to America to the University of Minnesota to undertake a two year scholarship. Here he refined his surgical techniques and performed his first heart surgery.

When he returned to South Africa in 1958 he was appointed Head of Experimental Surgery at Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town. On December 3, 1967, Barnard, assisted by his brother Marius and a team of 30 people, performed the world's first heart transplant. The recipient of the heart was 54 year old Louis Washkansky. The operation took around five hours. Washkansky survived for 18 days after the transplant, but unfortunately died of pneumonia. On the 2 January 1968 Barnard performed his second heart transplant on Philip Blaiberg, who survived for 19 months with his new heart. Barnard's longest surviving heart transplant patient was Dirk van Zyl, who lived for more than 23 years with his donor heart.

Barnard developed rheumatoid arthritis in his hands which forced him to retire from surgery in 1983. He died on 2nd September 2001 while on holiday in Cyprus.

Answer: Rene Laennec

Rene-Theophile-Hyacinthe Laennec was born in February 1781 in Quimper, France. He was actively discouraged from studying medicine by his lawyer father, but in 1799 he began studying at the University of Paris. Here he was trained to use sound as a diagnostic tool to identify medical conditions. The traditional method to do this was to place the ear directly onto the patient's chest. Laennec used a paper tube as funnel to listen and found that this made the sounds much clearer and more distinct.

Laennec was a skilled flautist and his skill in carving his own wooden flutes enabled him to fashion the first stethoscope out of wood in 1816. Using this instrument he was able to more accurately investigate the noises made by the heart and lungs of his patients. Wooden tubes were used as stethoscopes until the end of the nineteenth century when a doctor called Arthur Leared made a more complex model with two earpieces (called a binaural).

Laennec became a lecturer at the College of France in 1822 and in January 1823, he became a full member of the French Academy of Medicine and professor at the medical clinic of the College. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 45 on 13 August 1826.

Answer: Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born on the 25 July 1920 in London, England. She studied chemistry at Newnham College, Cambridge, and graduated with second-class honours in 1941. During World War II (1939-1945) she researched the structure of coal and carbon as part of the war effort and through this research she received a doctoral degree in 1945.

After the war she moved to Paris, France, where she researched the structure of carbons using x-ray diffraction. She returned to London in 1951 to continue her research. She began investigating the structure of DNA and her work in this field laid the foundation stones for the work of scientists James Watson and Francis Crick, who would later win the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the shape of DNA as a twisted helix.

From 1953 until her death Franklin worked at Birbeck College, London. She died on 16th April 1958.

Answer: Edward Jenner

Edward Jenner was born 17 May 1749 in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England. In 1770 he started an apprenticeship in anatomy and surgery at St George's Hospital in London. In 1772 he returned to his home town of Berkeley and spent the rest of his career as a doctor.

The disease of smallpox was very prevalent at this time killing many people. Jenner observed that milkmaids seemed generally immune to the disease after contracting the milder disease of cowpox. In 1796 he scraped pus from the cowpox blisters of a milkmaid and injected eight year old James Phipps, the son of his gardener, in the arm. The boy suffered minor symptoms of illness but no full blown infection. He later injected the boy with a mild form of smallpox and he showed no sign of infection. He submitted his results to the Royal Society, London, but they told him he needed more proof. He successfully tested his hypothesis on several more subjects including his 11 month old son. In 1798 his results were finally published and Jenner coined the word "vaccine" from the Latin word "vacca", which means cow.

Although at first many people were highly skeptical of the procedure it soon became apparent that the protection the vaccination gave were beneficial and vaccinating became widespread.

Jenner died of a stroke at the age of 73 on the 26 January 1823.

Answer: Jonas Salk

Jonas Salk was born in New York on 28 October 1914 to Jewish parents. He attended New York University School of Medicine studying medicine, but chose to concentrate on medical research rather than becoming a physician. He earned his medical degree in 1939, and began an internship at Mount Sinai Hospital as a physician scientist.

At this time polio was a massive public health problem with thousands dying or being left with disabilities. In 1947 Salk accepted a position at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine to study the polio virus and develop a vaccine against it. It took seven years to produce the vaccine and after several trials on animals a field trial was set up and about a million children were vaccinated as well as scores of volunteers including himself and his family. The vaccine was declared safe in April 1955, saving countless lives and preventing crippling disabilities.

Salk spent the last years of his life searching for a vaccine against HIV. He died at the age of 80 on the 23 June 1995.

Answer: William Harvey

William Harvey was born on the 1 April 1578 in Folkstone, Kent, England. After being educated in Kent and Cambridge he continued his studies at the University of Padua in Italy, which was a leading medical school at the time. He studied under the leading anatomist and surgeon Hieronymus Fabricius, who had a great influence on him. He received his doctorate in 1602 and returned to England, where he was also awarded a Doctor of Medicine degree from Cambridge University.

Harvey's greatest achievement was recognising that blood flows round the body pumped by the heart through a single system of veins and arteries. Prior to this it had been believed that two separate blood systems operated within the body. His ideas came from dissecting human bodies.

Harvey died on the 3 June 1657 at the age of 79.