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Alison, Andrew, Caroline, Christopher, Colin, Emily, Esme, Ethan, Geoffrey, Gillian, Juliana, Maiya, Maxwell, Michelle, Oliver, Rebecca and Richard.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. The images used in this Blogspot or spin-off booklets are either in the Public Domain or are Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 from Wikimedia Commons. None of the images has been modified in any way.

This site is dedicated to publication of new and original rhymes in biology, chemistry, physics, planet physics, math, anatomy, physiology and other medical sciences .  They are easy to read and designed to help students remember concepts. Open source images from Wikimedia Commons with rhymes are attributed at the end of the page.

The categories of rhymes are listed in the boxes above, under the title. Click on a subject box to get to its rhymes. The titles of rhymes in each subject are listed alphabetically at the top of the subject page (they are not hyperlinks). Scroll down the page to reach the rhymes. If you see a factual error in a rhyme, please e-mail me about it.

Teachers can introduce a rhyme to a class after they have studied the concept. The class can criticize it, discuss it, learn it or make up an alternative rhyme. Many rhymes are mnemonics. Mnemonic rhymes have a long tradition. One reminds us the days in each month:         

Thirty days hath September,

April, June and November.

All the rest have thirty one,

Excepting February alone,

That has twenty eight days clear,

And twenty nine in each leap year.

There is no panacea to avoid the hard work of study, but after learning lots of related facts, rhymes and mnemonics can be useful reminders. 

Human body systems are respiratory, skeletal, muscular, endocrine, cardiovascular, digestive, reproductive, nervous, excretory, integument and immune. 

If your anatomy, physiology or biology professor or teacher asks you to name the 11 systems, this mnemonic rhyme might jog your memory:   

Lungs, bones, meat

Steroids, heart, eat

Sex, fear, excrete,

Skin and bugs defeat.

As more rhymes are added, it is planned to divide the categories into sub-disciplines. If you make up an original science rhyme, send it to me. If it is published here you will be credited as the author. All constructive comments are also welcome.

alanbeech@comcast.net.


Rhymes are listed at the top of each category page only.

Selected Quotes from Famous Men & Women of Science & Medicine (& Others).

Archimedes 287-212 BC. Eureka! (I have found it!)

Aristotle 384-322 BC. Poetry is something more philosophic and of greater import than history.

Francis Bacon 1561-1626. Cure the disease and kill the patient.

Claude Bernard 1813-1878. Everything is poisonous, nothing is poisonous, it is all a matter of dose.

Robert Bunsen 1811-1899. A chemist who is not a physicist is nothing at all.

Francis Crick 1916-2004. If you want to understand function, study structure.

Nicolaus Copernicus 1473-1543. Finally we shall place the Sun himself at the center of the universe.

Charles Darwin 1809-1882. I love fools’ experiments, I am always making them.

Democritus 460-370 BC. I would rather discover one scientific fact than become King of Persia.

Thomas Alva Edison 1847-1931. Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration.

Albert Einstein 1879-1955. Science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

Euclid 300 BC. Quod erat demonstrandum – (QED-which was to be proved - schoolboy translation Quite Easily Done).

Alexander Fleming 1881-1955. The lone worker makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought and perception of an individual.

Benjamin Franklin 1706-1790. Little strokes fell great oaks.

Galileo Galilei 1564-1642. Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777-1855. Mathematics is the queen of the sciences.

William Harvey 1578-1657. All we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown.

Werner Heisenberg 1901-1976. Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.

Hippocrates 460-377 BC. …I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment…

Carl Jung 1875-1961. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

Carolus Linnaeus 1707-1778. To live by medicine is to live horribly.

John Locke 1632-1723 New opinions are always suspected and usually opposed.

Lucretius 99-55 BC. Nothing can be created from nothing.

James Clerk Maxwell 1831-1879. All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers.

Isaac Newton 1642-1727 If I have seen further than others it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Florence Nightingale 1820-1910. It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm.

Blaise Pascal 1623-1662. Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Louis Pasteur 1822-1895. In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.

Linus Pauling 1901-1994. Science is the search for truth – it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent.

Alexander Pope 1688-1744 Poet. Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Pythagoras 582-500 BC. Reason is immortal, all else is mortal.

Albert Schweitzer 1875-1965. Reverence for life.