Museum members support scholarship like this. Phoebe Yates Levy Pember is one of the Confederacy’s most celebrated nurses. She was born to the wealthy Levy family in Charleston, South Carolina. Her husband, Thomas Pember, died from tuberculosis in the first year of the war. She joined the Confederate nursing campaign in December 1862 and served as chief matron of the Second Division of the Chimborazo Hospital on the outskirts of Richmond, the largest hospital in the Confederacy. In addition to her tireless commitment to patient care, perhaps she is most famous for waging a one-woman crusade against alcohol abuse at the Chimborazo Hospital. Pember was appalled by the abuse of the hospital’s limited alcohol supply by doctors, other hospital employees and even patients. As a result of this mismanagement of vital resources, by the end of the war, Pember insisted on monitoring the hospital’s alcohol supplies. While participation in the temperance movement was common for nineteenth-century middle and upper class women of the North and South, such involvement generally consisted of less extreme efforts than lobbying for command of a hospital’s entire alcohol supply. Pember’s vigilantism prompted repeated complaints from her male colleagues and even garnered interest from some of the most powerful men in the Confederate Medical Department, including Medical Director William Carrington.