St. Peregrine

Peregrine Laziosi is remembered chiefly as the patron saint of cancer patients, and his own story includes a miraculous healing of precisely that kind. He was born at Forlì in northern Italy around 1260 and began his life in opposition to the Church, taking part in an anti-papal uprising in Forlì when he was a young man. During a confrontation with the apostolic legate Philip Benizi, Peregrine struck the friar in the face. Benizi's response — offering the other cheek without retaliation — broke something in Peregrine. He sought out Benizi afterward, made his confession, and the course of his life changed. He eventually entered the Servite Order at Siena and later returned to Forlì as a Servite priest, where he lived for decades known for his preaching, severe penances, and care for the poor.

In his later years he developed a severe cancer of the foot. When the surgeons were about to amputate the following day, he spent a night in prayer before an image of Christ crucified and awoke to find the cancer gone — a healing that the examining physicians could not explain. The account rests on a single set of medieval sources and deserves to be treated with corresponding care, but it has been seriously received. Peregrine lived into his eighties, dying in 1345. He was beatified in 1702 and canonized in 1726. The association with cancer — rooted in the healing of his own foot — has made him one of the most invoked of the later medieval saints in pastoral settings where medicine has reached its limit.