Phoebe Pember

Phoebe Yates Levy Pember (August 18, 1823 – March 4, 1913) was a member of a prominent American Jewish family from Charleston, South Carolina, and a nurse and female administrator of Chimborazo Hospital at Richmond, Virginia, during the American Civil War. She assumed the responsibility informally at the age of 39 and eventually over 15,000 patients came under her direct care during the war. Family and early life Pember was born on August 18, 1823, and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. The fourth of seven children, she was raised in a wealthy and socially prominent Jewish family; her father, Jacob Clavius Levy (son of Moses Levy of Charleston), was a successful merchant, while her mother, Fanny Yates, was the seventh and youngest daughter of Samuel Yates and Martha Abrahams. One of Pember's sisters, Eugenia Levy, married lawyer and congressman Philip Phillips, and would later be twice imprisoned for her support of the Confederate cause. Exemplifying the way in which wealth enabled some antebellum Jewish families to gain full community acceptance, the Levy family moved among Charleston's elite until a series of financial setbacks sent them to Savannah, Georgia, in the late 1840s. Marriage Pember apparently received some formal schooling before her 1856 marriage to Bostonian Thomas Pember, who was not Jewish. He died soon after their marriage and by late 1861 she was a childless widow, living with her parents in Marietta, Georgia, where they had fled to escape the ravages of war. Unhappy at home, Pember accepted an invitation to serve at Richmond's Chimborazo Hospital. She reported for duty in December 1862. The Civil War A sprawling institution on the outskirts of the city, Chimborazo was reportedly the largest military hospital in the world in the 1860s. By the end of the Civil War, the hospital had cared for some 76,000 patients. Pember served as Chief Matron of one of the facility's five divisions. It was an unusual job for a woman, at a time when virtually all nursing was done by men. Pember's varied duties surely required what one of her contemporaries described as her "will of steel under a suave refinement." Although Pember had to thwart efforts by her staff to pilfer supplies, once reportedly threatening a would-be thief with a gun, she also seems to have been accepted and valued by patients. Lacking adequate food, medicine, and other supplies, often that warm presence was the best that Pember and her staff could offer.