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The saints

St. Camillus de Lellis

A gambling, brawling soldier with a bad leg who became the reformer of hospitals.

Feast: 14 July · 1550 to 1614 · Reformation and missions · Abruzzo and Rome, Italy

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Painting of St. Camillus de Lellis, wearing a red cross on his habit, embracing Jesus taken down from the cross.

Unidentified painter. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Home / The saints / St. Camillus de Lellis

Rome, 1580s

Camillus was a huge, hot-tempered soldier and a compulsive gambler who lost everything.1

A leg wound that never healed sent him to the hospital of San Giacomo in Rome.1

He saw how badly the sick were treated, and started serving them himself.

Patron of hospitals, the sick, nurses and health care workers1

01St. Camillus de Lellis

Servants of the sick

He became a priest and founded the Ministers of the Sick, who wore a red cross.1

His brothers treated the sick as if they were Christ, and went to the battlefields and plague wards.1

Live it this week

Treat a patient like Christ

Camillus told his brothers to care for the sick like a mother for her only child. If you work in health care, give that patience to one patient this week; if not, visit someone in the hospital.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint Camillus de Lellis”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.