Yaksungga: Rhyme of medicinal herbs in Sugungga, Pansori. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNLGcaGiLJE)

Pansori is a unique genre of Korean art music. Sugungga is a form of Pansori that is so famous as to be included in the representative five texts of Pansori, and is also a fable about a Dragon King who lived in a palace on the water. The Dragon King had a disease and the major plot of the story is the finding of a cure for his illness. At the beginning of Sugungga, Yaksungga appears on the scene in the form of an ascetic who has knowledge of various herbal medicines. By reciting and singing this medical knowledge, Yaksungga functions as an effective mnemonic technique to aid memorization of the herbs and their properties. Yaksungga exists only in Korea, and functions in Sugungga not only as a dramatic factor in the play, but also as a tool that allows people to easily learn professional medical knowledge during those times, not by books, but by funny rhymes, which gave people the opportunities to apply such knowledge in useful ways.