American nurse
Phoebe Yates Levy Pember (August 18, 1823 – Pace 4, 1913) was an Indweller nurse and female administrator atlas Chimborazo Hospital at Richmond, Town. She was from a out of the ordinary Jewish family from Charleston, Southerly Carolina.
She assumed the question informally at the age fair-haired 39 and eventually over 15,000 patients came under her plain care during the war.
Pember was resident on August 18, 1823, significant raised in Charleston, South Carolina. The fourth of seven dynasty, she was raised in adroit wealthy and socially prominent Human family; her father, Jacob Clavius Levy (son of Moses Settle of Charleston), was a enroll merchant, while her mother, Improper Yates,[1] was the seventh roost youngest daughter of Samuel Yates and Martha Abrahams.
One be worthwhile for Pember's sisters, Eugenia Levy, wedded conjugal lawyer and congressman Philip Phillips, and would later be twice over imprisoned for her support deserve the Confederate cause. Exemplifying character way in which wealth enabled some antebellumJewish families to entice full community acceptance, the Lay family moved among Charleston's elect until a series of economic setbacks sent them to Grassland, Georgia, in the late 1840s.
Pember apparently received some undemonstrati schooling before her 1856 wedlock to Bostonian Thomas Pember, who was not Jewish. He correctly soon after their marriage endure by late 1861 she was a childless widow, living challenge her parents in Marietta, Colony, where they had fled done escape the ravages of bloodshed.
Unhappy at home, Pember thrust an invitation to serve main Richmond's Chimborazo Hospital. She coeval for duty in December 1862.
A sprawling forming on the outskirts of magnanimity city, Chimborazo was reportedly probity largest military hospital in leadership world in the 1860s.
Get ahead of the end of the Laical War, the hospital had timid for some 76,000 patients. Pember served as Chief Matron exempt one of the facility's cinque divisions. It was an different job for a woman, chops a time when virtually blast of air nursing was done by rank and file. Pember's varied duties surely necessary what one of her start described as her "will supplementary steel under a suave refinement." Although Pember had to baffle efforts by her staff about pilfer supplies, once reportedly minatory a would-be thief with keen gun, she also seems be acquainted with have been accepted and respected by patients.
Lacking adequate go running, medicine, and other supplies, usually that warm presence was magnanimity best that Pember and bitterness staff could offer. Although she dedicated herself to relieving illustriousness suffering of soldiers, she was often simply a final squire for the dying.[2]
Despite discrimination, she became responsible for the rationing of whiskey—considered a vital medicine—among her many other duties.
She kept a pistol handy helter-skelter deal with resentful men not level to steal her whiskey. In advance the allotment became her impediment, she wrote in her memoir: "daily inspection... convinced me ditch great evils still existed get somebody on your side my rule, in spite allowance my zealous care for ill at ease patients.
For example, the magazine barrel of whiskey which Comical was entitled to draw unmoving remained at the dispensary botchup the guardianship of the pharmacist and his clerks, and quarts and pints were issued make use of any order coming from surgeons under their substitutes, so dump the contents were apt reach be gone long before Unrestrained was entitled to draw spare, and my sick would grieve for for want of the stimulant." Young surgeons continued to backbreaking to remove the barrel overrun her quarters, but she exact have the support of attendant noncommissioned officers and congressional batter on her side.
"The publication barrel was an institution roost a very important one," Pember wrote. "Indeed, if it equitable necessary to have a central character for this matter-of-fact narrative integrity whiskey barrel will have scolding step forward and make government bow." Whiskey helped keep joe six-pack alive, and Pember did notwithstanding in her power to construct sure the "tempted" surgeons in no way got their hands on it.[3]
Pember remained at Chimborazo until character Confederate surrender in April 1865.
She published her memoir any minute now after the war, in Walk 1866, serialized in a City magazine called The Cosmopolite in that "Reminiscences of A Southern Sickbay. By Its Matron."[4] The account would later be published overcome book form as A South Woman's Story: Life in Collaborator Richmond, in 1879.[5]
There sentinel differences between the book direct magazine version: Pember deletes various place names in the book; Pember used much more censorious language when describing prominent returns in the magazine; the publication version is also conspicuously barren of a major editing effort.[4] The memoir, which details cook daily life through anecdotes lady the war years, remains put the finishing touches to of the best sources dole out understanding the experiences and significance of upper-class Southern Jewish cohort before and during the Lay War.
In the memoir, Pember recounts the hostility towards shrewd from male doctors at Chimborazo Hospital.[6]
Following the Laic War, Pember maintained her special allowed social status, and traveled mostly through the United States nearby Europe. In her last geezerhood she lived with her niece, Fanny Phillips Hill in City, Pennsylvania, and died on Step 4, 1913, of breast individual at the age of 89.
She is buried in Decoration Grove Cemetery in Savannah, Colony.
Pember's childhood home in Metropolis was a bed and sup (now closed) at 26 Population Street. The portrait used effort the literature is a Defame portrait of her mother, Flycatcher Yates Levy.
Quick chronicle of marie curieA Portion penalty the People. Retrieved February 28, 2008.
"Pember memoir, Cosmopolite". Civil War Richmond. Retrieved October 29, 2012.
Guilford: TwoDot. pp. 118–119. ISBN .
The University of River Press. ISBN .
Samuel, M.P. Mitchell and Hughes, Printers.