Southern Woman's Story by Phoebe Yates Pember

By the end of the Civil War, the hospital had cared for some 76,000 patients. She reported for duty in December 1862.Ī sprawling institution on the outskirts of the city, Chimborazo was reportedly the largest military hospital in the world in the 1860s. Unhappy at home, Pember accepted an invitation to serve at Richmond's Chimborazo Hospital. 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. Pember apparently received some formal schooling before her 1856 marriage to Bostonian Thomas Pember, who was not Jewish. 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. 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. 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. Pember was born on August 18, 1823, and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. She assumed the responsibility informally at the age of 39 and eventually over 15,000 patients came under her direct care during the war.

Phoebe Yates Levy Pember (Aug– 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.

Southern Woman's Story by Phoebe Yates Pember