Nurse Pember and the Whiskey War

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BY MARY C. MESKAUSKAS

From atop Chimborazo Hill on the western outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, Phoebe Yates Pember, matron of Chimborazo Hospital Number Two, looked down upon “a scene of indescribable confusion.” A few months earlier, the collapse of the Confederacy had been only a whispered rumor. Now, on the afternoon of April 2, 1865, that depressing prospect had become a shocking reality. With Federal troops fast on their heels, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, his cabinet, and other government officials were scampering out of town by train, carriage, and any other available form of transportation.

Surgeons, nurses, and stewards followed their example and skedaddled from the Chimborazo complex. After bidding her fleeing friends farewell, Pember turned away from the turbulent scene and walked through her nearly empty wards. Night was setting in. As she later wrote, “Beds in which paralyzed, rheumatic, and helpless patients had laid for months were empty. The miracles of the New Testament had been re-enacted. The lame, the halt, and the blind had been cured.”

Pember had arrived at Chimborazo Hospital, a complex of long, single-story, whitewashed buildings sprawled atop Chimborazo Hill, on December 18, 1862. Chimborazo was at the time said to be the largest military hospital in the world, and Phoebe would be its first matron. She had accepted the job from Mrs. George Wythe Randolph, wife of the Confederate secretary of war, mainly to escape unhappiness and inactivity at the Yates homestead in Marietta, Georgia, where she had gone to live after the death of her husband the previous year.

In a November 29, 1862, letter to her sister, Eugenia, Pember admitted she was a little anxious about her decision: “You may imagine how frightened and nervous I feel concerning the step I am about to take and how important in this small way it will be to me, for I have too much common sense to underrate what I am giving up.” In the same letter she also wrote proudly that she was to have “entire charge of my department, seeing that everything is clean, orderly and all prescriptions of physicians given in proper time, food properly prepared and so on.”

Though she had no professional medical training, Pember had run a large household and cared for her husband, who had suffered from tuberculosis. She considered herself an efficient and educated woman well up to the challenge of heading one of Chimborazo’s five hospital divisions. Nevertheless, the conditions she encountered at the hospital would challenge her efficiency and her patience. The challenge began with her living space. The surgeon-in-charge had made no preparations for his female nurses, so Phoebe set to work converting a vacant building into her own quarters, an office, parlor, laundry area, pantry, and kitchen.

As Pember’s confidence grew so did her use of authority. She was responsible for procuring supplies and food for her patients’ special diets and she soon insisted upon total control of luxuries such as coffee, tea, and milk. Still, her position seemed little more than that of a chief cook until the surgeon-in-charge, Dr. James B. McCaw, found her peeling potatoes one day. McCaw initiated a thorough study of hospital rules that resulted in the organization of a full staff under Pember’s jurisdiction. She was provided with an assistant matron, cooks and bakers, and two laborers to perform menial tasks.

Pember soon had her first major skirmish with traditional male authority at the hospital, over a problem that nearly proved her undoing. Each hospital division received its own monthly barrel of whiskey for medicinal purposes. Pember noted that “the monthly barrel of whiskey which I was entitled to draw still remained at the dispensary under the guardianship of the apothecary and his clerks, and quarts and pints were issued through any order coming from surgeons or their substitutes, so that the contents were apt to be gone long before I was entitled to draw more, and my sick would suffer for want of the stimulant.”

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