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What is Lager Bier?

About This Item

  • Title: What is Lager Bier?
  • Date: 29 September 1857
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.00752
  • Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 29 September 1857: 2. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm scan of the original issue. Microfilm of original issue held at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This piece is unsigned, as was the case for most of Whitman's journalism. However, this editorial is part of a series of texts that deal with a coherent theme that has been identified by the Whitman Archive journalism team as likely authored by Whitman. This decision is based on a combination of historical and (auto)biographical accounts, similarity to contemporary Whitman writings, a history of scholarly attribution, extant clippings retained by Whitman, computational stylometric analysis, and, in some cases, manuscript evidence in Whitman’s hand.
  • Contributors to digital file: Caitlin Matheis Samantha Gilmore Thara Michaelis Kevin McMullen Stephanie Blalock Karie Cobb
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "What is Lager Bier?." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 16 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.00752.xml (TEI)
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WHAT IS LAGER BIER?—

The Sunday Times says this mooted question has just been ably answered, in a pamplet​ written by Dr. Henry Anders, of this city. It is a reply to an article from the pen of Dr. Dixon, of "The Scalpel," in which lager is held up as the abomination of the age.1 Dr. Anders insists that lager bier is a medicinal beverage, and his chemical analysis gives, as its constituents, lupulin, a resinous substance resembling juniper, mucilage, iron, albumen, tannin, malt meal, acetate of ammonia, alcohol, carbonic acid, and water. He declares that ladies who drink it never enjoy a familyless wedded life; and that when men imbibe it, the consequences is "a humanisation that ignores all arbitrary difference between ranks and classes—that fraternises man and man, irrespective of the condition of their coats, or the hardness of their hands, and irrespective of the other thousand and one unreal social distinctions upon which superficial minds love to dwell, and silly ones to plume themselves."

Notes:

1. The Scalpel was published quarterly in New York by editor and doctor Edward H. Dixon (1808—1880). [back]

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