Camillus de Lellis spent his youth around cards, dice, military life, and repeated instability. A wound in his foot would not heal. In 1575, after contact with Capuchin friars, the soldier and gambler underwent a conversion that redirected the force of his personality rather than erasing it.
Camillus returned to the hospitals he already knew as a patient and worker. He insisted that the sick be served with competence, dignity, and the affection a loving mother would show her only sick child. He founded the Ministers of the Sick, now called the Camillians. The man whose early life revolved around risk learned to spend himself on people from whom society expected nothing in return.