Patron Saint of Nurses

Why St. Camillus de Lellis?

This is a patronage with several genuine answers, and pages that give only one are simplifying. Camillus de Lellis is the strongest. He was a former soldier and compulsive gambler with a leg wound that never properly healed, who ended up working in the hospital that had once turned him away as a patient. He founded an order to care for the sick, insisted his men serve plague victims and the dying when others would not, and had them wear a red cross on their habits, centuries before that symbol meant what it means now. Pope Leo XIII formally named him patron of the sick and of hospitals, and Pius XI extended it to nurses. St. John of God, who founded a hospitaller order after his own period of mental collapse, shares the patronage of hospitals and nurses and is often named alongside him. St. Agatha appears in this list for a different reason: her patronage of nurses comes through her martyrdom and her association with care of the breast and with those tending the wounded. So the honest answer is that the Church has more than one, and which name a hospital or a nursing school uses often depends on its own founding order.

Who was St. Camillus de Lellis?

Camillus de Lellis was born in 1550 and spent his youth as a soldier and a compulsive gambler, at one point losing everything he owned including the shirt he was wearing. A leg wound that never healed properly took him to the San Giacomo hospital in Rome, first as a patient and then, when he could not pay, as a servant.

What he found there changed him. Hospitals of the period were places the poor went to die, staffed largely by hired help who did not much care. He was dismissed for arguing about the standard of care. He came back, was ordained, and founded an order whose members took a fourth vow: to serve the sick even at risk of their own lives, including in plague.

They wore a red cross on the habit, three centuries before the Red Cross took the symbol. He insisted his men treat patients as they would treat Christ, and he made them do the unglamorous work: washing, feeding, changing beds, sitting with the dying.

The feast: July 14

July 14. He is patron of nurses, of the sick, and of hospitals, and his order still runs and staffs them. Many nursing schools keep the feast, and the blessing of hands is a custom associated with it. St. Agatha and St. Catherine of Siena are also invoked by nurses in different traditions.

How to ask their intercession

Nurses commonly ask at the start of a shift, and Camillus is a natural intercessor for the specific problem of caring well when you are exhausted, which was the condition he worked in for most of his life. Families of patients ask for the nursing staff by name more often than the staff realise.