Camillus de Lellis

Camillus de Lellis was born on 25 May 1550 in Bucchianico, in the Abruzzo region of the Kingdom of Naples, to Giovanni de Lellis, an officer in the army of Charles V, and Camilla Compelli de Laureto. His mother was nearly fifty at his birth and died when he was still a child, around 1562. Left largely without close parental guidance, he followed his father into military service. In his youth and early adulthood he fought as a soldier in Venetian and later Spanish service, including campaigns against the Ottoman Turks. During this period he received a serious wound in his right leg that never fully healed, and he also fell into compulsive gambling. By about 1574 he had lost his remaining possessions at cards, left the army, and was reduced to destitution.

After a time of wandering he found work as a laborer at the Capuchin friary of San Giovanni in Manfredonia. There, under the influence of the friars, he underwent a conversion of life around 1575. He twice sought admission to the Capuchins, but on both occasions he was dismissed because of the chronic ulcer on his leg. He then went to Rome and entered the Hospital of San Giacomo degli Incurabili, first as a patient and afterward as a caregiver and administrator. The neglect and roughness with which the sick were commonly treated in sixteenth-century hospitals moved him to gather companions who would serve the ill out of charity rather than as hired servants. Saint Philip Neri, who became his confessor, encouraged this vocation and his later studies for the priesthood.

Camillus was ordained a priest in 1584 by Thomas Goldwell, Bishop of St Asaph. The company he had formed for hospital ministry in 1582 received approval from Pope Sixtus V in 1586 as a confraternity. In 1591 Pope Gregory XIV raised it to a religious order, the Order of Clerics Regular, Ministers to the Sick, whose members became known as Camillians. Besides the three traditional vows they took a fourth vow to serve the sick even at the risk of their own lives, including during plague. They wore a black cassock marked with a large red cross, a sign later widely associated with medical charity. Houses were founded in Rome, Naples, Milan, Genoa, Bologna, and other Italian cities. Camillus insisted that patients be treated as persons in whom Christ was present, and he pressed practical reforms in cleanliness, diet, and constant attendance at the bedside, including night watches.

He and his companions served during outbreaks of plague and other epidemics, often at great personal danger. Camillus himself suffered continually from his leg wound and, in later years, from other serious ailments, yet he continued to visit hospitals and to govern the order until he resigned as superior general in 1607. He spent his remaining years in Rome, still attending the sick when he was able. He died there on 14 July 1614 and was buried in the Church of Santa Maria Maddalena, the Roman church of his congregation.

He was beatified in 1742 and canonized on 29 June 1746 by Pope Benedict XIV. His feast is kept on 14 July in the General Roman Calendar. He is invoked as patron of the sick, of hospitals, of nurses and physicians, of healthcare workers and hospital administrators, and of the dying, and he is also honored as a patron of the Abruzzo region. Because of his own youthful addiction to gambling he is sometimes invoked by those struggling with that vice. The Camillian order continued his work of hospital ministry and chaplaincy to the infirm, and the red cross worn by his religious became an enduring emblem of care for the sick.