Reminiscences of a Southern Hospital, by Its Matron: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Reminiscences of a Southern Hospital, by Its Matron, credited to Phoebe Yates Pember, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Reminiscences of a Southern Hospital, by Its Matron by Phoebe Yates Pember. Read by Sue Anderson Phoebe Yates Pember served as a matron in the Confederate Chimborazo military hospital in Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War, overseeing a dietary kitchen serving meals to 300 or more wounded soldiers daily. Reminiscences of a Southern Hospital is her vivid recounting of hospital life and of her tribulations (and personal growth) as a female administrator. To follow her from day one, when she is greeted with “ill-repressed disgust” that “one of them had come,” and she, herself, “could only understand that the position was one which dove-tailed the offices of housekeeper and cook” to the day when she as exerts control over the hospital’s “medicinal whiskey barrel” is to watch a woman find herself. Besides describing “daily scenes of pathos,” Pember gives a horrifying account of the prisoner exchange of November 1864 (“living and dead . . . not distinguishable”), and also of the evacuation and burning of Richmond in 1865. Her memoirs were serialized in Cosmopolite magazine in 1866, then reprinted in book form in 1879 under the title A Southern Woman’s Story. Pember was honored by the US Postal Service with a stamp in 1995. (Summary by Sue Anderson)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Reminiscences of a Southern Hospital, by Its Matron
• Author credits: Phoebe Yates Pember
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 9
• Listed recording duration: 4:18:05

Catalogue topics

• U. S. Civil War
• Richmond
• Virginia
• Cosmopolite magazine
• Confederate hospitals
• Chimborazo Military Hospital
• Women nurses in Civil War
• Confederacy

Track guide

1. 1 - His Mammy's Soup; The Whiskey Barrel — 34:29
2. 2 - Our Daily Trials; Sober Ladies Wanted — 26:44
3. 3 - Sad Letters; State Peculiarities and Differences — 34:41
4. 4 - Hopeless Inebriates; What Constitutes a Lady? — 31:10
5. 5 - Rat Surgeons; Vaccination — 22:53
6. 6 - Prisoners of War — 25:51
7. 7 - My Furlough; Importance of Hairpins — 25:13
8. 8 - Burning of the City; Entrance of the Federal Army — 23:42
9. 9 - Last Scenes — 33:22

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.