Dennis A. Rasbach

Dennis A. Rasbach, MD, is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a practicing surgeon. He was investigating the movements of his ancestor’s regiment (the 21st Pennsylvania Cavalry) when he came across Joshua Chamberlain and the contradictions surrounding his famous charge and wounding at Petersburg. Rasbach's research has persuasively altered the conventional understanding of events on the left flank of the Army of the Potomac on June 18, 1864, resulting in the movement of a marker commemorating Chamberlain's "on the spot" promotion to a new site, nearly a mile from its former location. Dennis, a member of the Civil War Round Table of Southwest Michigan, lives in St. Joseph, Michigan with his wife Ellen. They have been married for nearly four decades and have two grown sons and three grandchildren. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the Petersburg Campaign (Savas Beatie, 2016) was his first book.

The Chamberlain book now has been followed by I Am Perhaps Dying (Savas Beatie, 2018), the fascinating medical backstory of spinal tuberculosis that is hidden in the Civil War diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham. Gresham was an invalid teenager from Macon, Georgia who recorded observations on the war and countless other aspects of life in the South from 1860-1865. Sadly, a dark thread of disease and suffering winds through the journals, which provide a very unique window into the experience of life and death with the major plague of nineteenth century. I Am Perhaps Dying is a medical supplement to the larger Gresham diary, which has been published as The War Outside My Window, edited by Janet Elizabeth Croon (Savas Beatie, 2018).