St Camillus de Lellis

Camillus de Lellis was born in the Abruzzi in 1550, a huge, powerful man in body, but for a long time disordered in soul. As a young soldier fighting with the Venetians against the Turks, he contracted the painful disease in his leg that would trouble him for the rest of his life. He served for a time at the hospital of San Giacomo in Rome, partly as patient and partly as servant, but was dismissed. Worse still, his most destructive vice was gambling. It dragged him repeatedly into shame and destitution until at one point he had gambled away everything, even the shirt from his back. His conversion came slowly and then all at once. A vow once made in remorse, and a powerful exhortation from a Capuchin guardian at Manfredonia, finally broke him open. On Candlemas in 1575, riding away and turning the words over in his mind, he fell to his knees in tears and begged God for mercy. From that day he did not turn back. He tried the Capuchins, but his leg prevented profession, so he returned to San Giacomo and gave himself to the sick instead.

This life paints the hospitals of the time as spiritually and physically miserable places, badly served and often cruel. Camillus, grieved by the neglect he saw, conceived the idea of gathering men who would care for the sick not for wages or convenience but for Christ’s sake. Under the guidance of St Philip Neri he sought ordination so he could help the sick spiritually as well as bodily, and then with companions began the community that became the Ministers of the Sick. They made beds, cleaned wounds, prepared the dying for the sacraments, visited prisoners, served plague victims, and later even followed armies into the field, becoming in effect the first military field ambulance workers. Camillus himself never ceased to suffer. The leg disease endured for decades, and other grave bodily ailments piled up on him; yet he would scarcely allow anyone to wait on him, crawling from bed in the night if necessary to see whether patients needed anything. It was his attention to the dying that led him to notice a terrible danger in hospitals: some were being buried alive. He therefore ordered that prayers for the apparently dead continue for a time after breathing ceased, and that faces not be covered too quickly. He died in 1614 after seeing his order spread and his works firmly rooted. The picture is one of the strongest conversion stories in the book: a rough, unstable gambler turned into a tireless servant of the sick and dying, with mercy made practical in every detail.