Book Notes

________

Janet Elizabeth Croon, ed. The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860–1865. El Dorado Hills, Calif.: Savas Beatie, 2018. xxxvi + 428 pp. Ill. $34.95 (978-1-61121-388-1).

________

Dennis Rasbach. I Am Perhaps Dying: The Medical Backstory of Spinal Tuberculosis Hidden in the Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham. El Dorado Hills, Calif.: Savas Beatie, 2018. xx + 124 pp. Ill. $14.95 (978-1-94066-989-2).

The War Outside My Window is the first published edition of the seven diaries of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, an affluent teenager suffering from a debilitating disease in Macon, GA, during the Civil War. The journals detail his observations on “politics and the secession movement, the long and increasingly destructive Civil War, life in Macon at the center of a socially prominent slave-holding family, his interactions with many of the slaves, and his multitude of hobbies and interests” (p. ix). Gresham also documented a trip to Philadelphia to seek medical treatment for a leg injury that left him an invalid and recorded detailed entries about the symptoms and treatments he endured for his unknown illness, which would ultimately take his life in 1865. The volume contains all seven diaries plus an introduction, medical foreword, and medical afterword. The companion book, I Am Perhaps Dying by Dennis Rasbach, focuses on the medically related entries of the diaries, examining Gresham’s symptoms and treatments and the course of the disease over time. Rasbach reprints the medical entries with commentary, concluding that Gresham suffered from Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

The Editors