TECHNICAL NOTE: The great majority of the links below are to
scanned antique books at the Internet Archive, most of them
anthologies. Poems frequently run for several pages; when coming
to the apparent end of a poem, turn the page to make sure!
Biology ---
Microbiology and Medicine ---
The Vivisection Controversy ---
Palæontology
(on another page)
---
Eternity/Infinity
(on another page)
---
Evolution
(on another page)
---
Extraterrestrial Life
(on another page)
---
People
---
Back to Main Subject Index
- BIOLOGY: General
- Anonymous:
Amazing Facts About Food
Comic poem from the dawn of the age of biochemistry. Signed "H.W."
- Anonymous:
An Appeal for Air
Modern readers, unlike Nineteenth Century ones, would probably find this
poem funnier if it weren't written in rustic dialect.
- Anonymous:
Zoölogy
- Abbey, Henry:
The Giant Spider
Zoölogist (or at least cryptozoölogist) versus Shelob,
like a Ryder
Haggard story in high-quality blank verse.
- Abbey, Henry:
Science and the Soul
Despite the regretably didactic title, a
very interesting dream-poem about neuroscience,
evolution, and other topics, not
really anti-science but clearly sympathetic to the claim that science will
never fathom life.
- Barbauld, Anna Lætitia:
To Mrs. P---, with some drawings of birds and insects
A standard Romantic nature poem, but with more natural history
than most.
- Belloc, Hilaire:
The Dodo:
Belloc's most famous science-themed poem, but not
really a typical one.
- Browning, Robert:
Caliban Upon Setebos
"Or, Natural Theology in the Island." The various animals mentioned in the
poem all figure in The Voyage of the Beagle, to which
this is evidently a response.
- Darwin, Erasmus:
The Botanic Garden, containing The Economy of Vegetation
and The Loves of the Plants
- Darwin, Erasmus:
The Temple of Nature, or, The Origin of Society
- Dickinson, Emily:
The Brain
- Dobson, Austin:
To the Mammoth-Tortoise of the Mascarene Islands
With a passing reference to Darwin.
- Duganne, Augustine:
Men of Thought
From The Iron Harp. Includes the memorable, or at least unusual,
inspirational lines: "Insects build the coral isles // Insects pierce the ocean
through: // Ye are men, and will ye quail // When the insect did
not fail?"
- Elliott, Ebenezer:
Lines Written After Seeing the Plates of
Audubon's Birds of America
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo:
Botanist: A Quatrain
Botany for Emerson was the symbol of everything wrong with modern
science.
- Goethe:
The Metamorphosis of Plants.
An exposition of the vitalistic theory of growth.
- Hardy, Thomas:
Heredity:
The persistence of genetic traits.
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
The Chambered Nautilus
For many years, this was among the most
famous natural-history (and natural-theology) poems in the English language.
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
A Farewell to Agassiz
A comic blessing as the Harvard celebrity-scientist embarks for Brazil:
may Heaven keep him safe "from every beast and vermin // that to think of
sets us squirmin'" so that he may return with "a million novel data //
about the articulata."
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
To Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg
Diatom expert and pioneer of invertebrate palæontology.
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
Humboldt's Birthday
A centennial tribute to Humboldt, comparing
him favourably to his almost exact contemporary, Napoleon.
- Keiley, Jarvis:
The Song of the Jellyfish
- Masters, Edgar Lee:
Perry Zoll:
A scientist whose work ("on the intelligence
of plants") is recognised too late.
- Masters, Edgar Lee:
William Jones:
A naturalist who corresponds with Tyndall and others.
- Melville, Herman:
The Maldive Shark
- Melville, Herman:
We Fish
From the novel Mardi.
- Riley, James Whitcomb:
The Naturalist
To the ornithologist Oliver Davie.
- Seward, Anna:
Verses Written in Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin's Botanic Garden
Darwin seems to have attempted to pass off this poem as his own.
- Sigourney, Lydia H.:
The Coral Insect
- Smith, Charlotte:
The Horologe of the Fields
Clocks are all very well, but living creatures also measure time.
- Stansfield, Abraham:
The Gentle Botanist
- Stansfield, Abraham:
The Naturalist
- Stephens, J. Burton:
The Courtship of the Future
Love and biotech in 2876.
- Tabb, John Bannister:
The Astronomer
The brain is more astonishing than the sky.
- Tabb, John Bannister:
The Biologist
... thinks about death.
- Very, Jones:
The Potato Blight
is a message from God, not something explicable by science.
- Watson, Evelyn Mabel:
Phenomenon
Not a wonderful poem, but many naturalists have made the same
observation: dead birds are surprisingly hard to find.
- Watson, Evelyn Mabel:
Progression
Plants: "Who says they are a lower order than we?"
- Whitman, Walt:
The World Below the Brine
The deep sea
(one of the Nineteenth Century's
scientific frontiers) as an alien universe.
- Wood, Robert W.:
Animal Analogues
Comic poems for children, with scientific allusions.
- Wood, Robert W.:
How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers
Comic poems for children, with scientific allusions.
- Wynne, Annette:
The Airplane
Apparently written in some alternate Nineteenth Century
where it was not uncommon to see an airplane "spread
its wings like a butterfly"! Perhaps there is a connexion
to Wynne's poem
The Sparrow's Little Wings which contrasts birds with airplanes.
- Wynne, Annette:
To a Bird
How does it know so many things without human intelligence?
- MEDICINE and MICROBIOLOGY:
- Anonymous:
The Antiseptic Pledge
- Anonymous:
With bold bacilli in a kiss
- Anonymous:
The Microbes
- Anonymous:
Microscopic lens doth show
Very comforting.
- Anonymous:
There once were some learned M.D.'s
A pun.
- Ade, George:
The Microbe's Serenade
Uses the jargon of biology for humourous
effect,
but without much evidence of understanding the science.
- Atwell, Roy:
Some Little Bug
"... is going to find you some day."
- Belloc, Hilaire:
On Hygiene:
Succinct quatrain against modern medicine.
- Belloc, Hilaire:
The Microbe:
"All these have never yet been seen // But Scientists,
who ought to know, // Assure us that they must be so ..."
- Browning, Robert:
An Epistle
"Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician": to wit,
meeting and scientifically examining the resurrected Lazarus.
- Browning, Robert:
Paracelsus
- Buller, A. H. Reginald:
Pond Life
Microbes are as beautiful as celestial objects. [Unfortunately, only extracts from the poem have been published, part of a 2004 biographical sketch of Buller in the journal Manitoba History.]
- Chesterton, G. K.:
Hygiene
Satire against public health authorities who had proclaimed: "All
practical eugenicists are agreed on the importance of sleep."
- Crabbe, George:
The Borough, Letter VII: Physic
- Field, Eugene:
The Pneumogastric Nerve:
Medical satire.
- Guiterman, Arthur:
Strictly Germ-Proof
The Antiseptic Baby and the Prophylactic Pup
meet a rabbit, and are horrified.
- Hardy, Thomas:
The Aerolite
Panspermia. (Published 1927; under copyright in some countries.)
- Henley, W. E.:
In Hospital, 1872-1875
A truly remarkable patient's-eye view of Nineteenth
Century medicine; should be much better known than it is.
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
The Morning Visit
About a physician's correct bedside manner.
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
Poem at the Centennial Anniversary Dinner of the Massachusetts
Medical Society, June 8, 1881
Five pages arguing that going into medicine is a higher calling
than going into law or the Church.
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
Rip Van Winkle, M.D.
Medical "progress" is cyclical.
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
A Sentiment
A toast to Friendship, Science, and (medical) Art.
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
The Stethoscope Song
Every scientist, regardless of discipline, should
know this medical poem.
- Kipling, Rudyard:
Doctors
- Kipling, Rudyard:
Our Fathers of Old
The pros and cons of pre-scientific medicine. In its simultaneous defence
of tradition and progress, this is one of the most remarkable science-poems
of the long Nineteenth Century.
- Leverett, Mary E.:
A Discovery in Biology
Bacteria amoris, the cause of dolor cordis.
- MacKaye, Percy:
The Heart in the Jar:
In 1912, the Nobel prize for medicine was
awarded to Alexis Carrel,
whose work on keeping blood-vessels and
organs alive outside the body (some of it conducted, amazingly
enough, in collaboration with the aviator Charles Lindbergh) would eventually
lead to heart-transplantation technology.
- Masters, Edgar Lee:
Dr. Burke:
From the murder-novel in verse Domesday Book.
- Masters, Edgar Lee:
Dr. Scudder's Clinical Lecture:
A physician's technical
talk wanders into
stranger and stranger territory as he remembers one of his patients.
- Masters, Edgar Lee:
To a Spirochaeta:
On viewing a pathogen through the microscope.
- Mitchell, S. Weir:
To Abraham Jacobi, M.D.
- Mitchell, S. Weir:
The Birth and Death of Pain
For the fiftieth anniversary of general anæsthesia.
- Mitchell, S. Weir:
A Doctor's Century
For the centennial of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 1887.
- Mitchell, S. Weir:
Minerva Medica
For D. Hayes Andrews, on the 50th anniversary of his receiving the M.D.
- Mitchell, S. Weir:
On the Portrait of Oliver Wendell Holmes by Sarah Whitman
- Mitchell, S. Weir:
To William H. Welch
- Noyes, Alfred: The Last Voyage
Thoughts about medicine, religion, and physics, with mortality looming over all.
Published in 1930 and not available online because of copyright issues.
- Riley, James Whitcomb:
Doc Sifers
"He's jes' a great, big, brainy man -- that's where the trouble lays !" Riley
liked the protagonist of this short poem so well that he went on to write
a novel in verse about him,
The Rubáiyát of Doc Sifers.
- Riley, James Whitcomb:
The Doctor
- Ross, Sir Ronald:
In Exile:
Very long; Ross's spiritual autobiography.
The astonishing lines that Ross composed on 1897 August 21, the day of
his greatest discovery, and later embedded in the text of In Exile.
- Ross, Sir Ronald:
Indian Fevers: Pure research must precede finding cures, a lesson
evidently still unlearnt 130 years later.
- Sill, Edward Rowland:
Five Lives
The characters are protozoa.
- Smith, Horace:
Marshal Saxe and His Physician
Weak medical satire.
- Smith, James:
Doctor Gall
Satire on the neurologist/phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall.
- Stephens, J. Burton:
The Courtship of the Future
Love and biotech in 2876.
- Tabb, John Bannister:
The Astronomer
The brain is more astonishing than the sky.
- Taylor, Bert Leston:
The Great Obsession
... with cleanliness. "Let the sleeping microbe lie!"
- Thompson, Francis:
The Nineteenth Century
The century of Science, war, imperialism, microbes, etc. Will the Twentieth be better?
- Very, Jones:
Know Thyself
Religious reflexions inspired by a lecture on anatomy.
- Very, Jones:
The Moss and its Teachings
The mighty works of God, visible through a microscope.
- Very, Jones:
The Potato Blight
is a message from God, not something explicable by science.
THE VIVISECTION CONTROVERSY
SCIENTISTS: Biologists and Physicians
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
A Farewell to Agassiz
A comic blessing as the Harvard celebrity-scientist embarks for Brazil:
may Heaven keep him safe "from every beast and vermin // that to think of
sets us squirmin'" so that he may return with "a million novel data //
about the articulata."
- Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth:
The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz
- Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth:
Three Friends of Mine
one of them often thought to be Agassiz; see Sonnet III.
- Mitchell, S. Weir:
Minerva Medica
For D. Hayes Andrews, on the 50th anniversary of his receiving the M.D.
- Elliott, Ebenezer:
Lines Written After Seeing the Plates of
Audubon's Birds of America
- MacKaye, Percy:
The Heart in the Jar:
In 1912, the Nobel prize for medicine was
awarded to Alexis Carrel,
whose work on keeping blood-vessels and
organs alive outside the body (some of it conducted, amazingly
enough, in collaboration with the aviator Charles Lindbergh) would eventually
lead to heart-transplantation technology.
- Thompson, Francis:
The Nineteenth Century
The century of Darwin, war, imperialism, etc. Will the Twentieth be better?
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
To Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg
Diatom expert and pioneer of invertebrate palæontology.
- Smith, James:
Doctor Gall
Satire on the neurologist/phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall.
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
Humboldt's Birthday
A centennial tribute to Humboldt, comparing
him favourably to his almost exact contemporary, Napoleon.
- Mitchell, S. Weir:
To Abraham Jacobi, M.D.
- Arnold, Edwin:
Florence Nightingale
- Ross, Sir Ronald:
In Exile:
Very long; Ross's spiritual autobiography.
The astonishing lines that Ross composed on 1897 August 21, the day of
his greatest discovery, and later embedded in the text of In Exile.
Mitchell, S. Weir:
To William H. Welch
