Saint Camillus de Lellis

Camillus de Lellis was born in Bucchianico, in Abruzzo, on May 25, 1550. His mother Camilla gave birth to him at almost sixty and died when he was thirteen; his father was an officer in the service of Spain. He grew up nearly two meters tall, quarrelsome and hooked on cards: he lost everything he had at the card table, down to his shirt. He was a soldier of fortune until, in 1570, an ulcer on his foot forced him to stop. He went to Rome for treatment, to the hospital of San Giacomo degli Incurabili, where he was taken on as an orderly and then dismissed for his weakness for cards. He went back to soldiering, lost everything again, and ended up as a laborer at a Capuchin friary in Manfredonia. That is where he changed. He went back to San Giacomo, this time to stay, and became its director. Then he realized it wasn’t enough: the nurses of those days were poorly paid people who often treated the sick like objects. He wanted men who would serve them “like mothers with their sick children,” and since he couldn’t find them, he trained them himself. That is how the Ministers of the Sick were born, the Camillians, with a fourth vow: to care for the sick even at the risk of their own lives, plague included. They wore a red cross on their habit — the same cross that in the nineteenth century would become the symbol of emergency aid all over the world. He died in Rome on July 14, 1614. He is the patron saint of the sick, of hospitals and of nurses. If your name is Camillo, today is your name day.