St. Camillus of Lellis was the founder of the Camellians and he was called “Father of a Good Death.” He was born in 1550 in Bocchianico, Italy, and fought for Venice against the Turks, taking up a military and gambling career which left him penniless in Naples in 1574.

Camillus joined the Capuchin Franciscans that year but had to leave because of a diseased leg, the result of an illness he contracted in a war against the Turks.

Devoted to the sick, Camillus became director of St. Giacomo Hospital in Rome. His confessor at the time was St. Philip Neri, and from him he received permission to be ordained. With two companions, Camillus decided to found a congregation to care for the sick – the Ministers of the Sick, the Camellians. He was ordained by Bishop Thomas Goldwell of St. Asaph of England and started the congregation, enlarging the facilities of their mission in 1585 and opening a house in Naples in 1588.

Camillus and his men cared for men aboard plague-stricken ships in the harbor of Rome. In 1591, Pope Gregory XIV approved the congregation, and Camillus sent members to Hungary and Croatia. There they worked in the first field medical unit to care for troops wounded in battled.

Camillus resigned as superior of the congregation in 1607, dying in Rome on July 14, 1614. He was canonized in 1746 and declared the patron of the sick with St. John of God.