Camillus de Lellis

A tall man, a soldier of fortune in the wars against the Turks, Camillus de Lellis gambled away everything down to his shirt and hired himself out as a labourer to a Capuchin friary. A wound in his leg, which never healed, brought him to the hospital of San Giacomo in Rome, where he was first a patient, then dismissed, then taken back, then director — and where he saw what was done to the dying. He gathered his first companions in 1582, was ordained priest in 1584, and Sixtus V approved in 1586 the Company of the Ministers of the Sick; Gregory XIV erected it as an order of clerks regular in 1591, with a fourth vow to nurse even in time of plague. They wear a red cross on the cassock and were among the first to follow armies with field relief.