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St. Camillus de Lellis (1550-1614)
Born in 1550 at Bocchiancio in the Abruzzi, he was the son of a soldier and grew to be a hot-tempered giant--he once threatened to throw a blasphemer out of a coach in which they were travelling--over six feet six inches tall and broad in proportion, with piercing black eyes. At the age of seventeen he enlisted, together with his father now aged seventy-six, in the Venetian army; but it was not long before his father died, and Camillus was reduced to destitution by his persistent craze for gambling. Although some Capuchins at Mangredonia took pity on him, he did not see his life for what it was until 1575, when he decided to enter the hospital of San Giacomo in Rome.
Henceforth he devoted the rest of his life to the care of the sick in conditions which it is almost impossible to imagine: patients were left to rot in their own filth, they were hurried off to the mortuary before they were dead and were even beaten by their attendants. Camillus was determined to found an order, whose members would bind themselves to help the sick, the plague-ridden and the dying; so he became a priest and, after his ordination, founded the ministers of the sick, or Camillans. For most of his life he was crippled by a diseased leg which required constant dressing, b a rupture, and by feet so callused that he had to walk with a stick; yet he continued the full duties of a priest with the regular visiting and care of the sick, even to the extent of denying himself more than three or four hours sleep nightly.
By the time he retired from the generalship of his Order in 1607, there were three hundred members, fifteen houses and eight hospitals. At least 170 members had died in the exercise of their vocation, and the first 'field ambulances' to serve troops in the field had also been established. Camillus has sometimes been called the Red Cross saint, because his order wear a black habit with a red cross on the right of the breast, and he is the patron of the sick and of all nurses.
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