17. The Camillian Order still have the heart of their founder, St. Camillus.
Camillus of Lellis (1550-1614) started life as a very naughty boy. Standing at a whopping 6’6″ (very rare in the 16th century, when people were generally much shorter), the short-tempered Camillus fought in the Venetian Army, and had a serious gambling problem. After betting, and subsequently losing, everything he owned, he experienced a religious conversion, and in 1585 founded the Camillian Order of male nurses, which became the first military ambulance unit in history. Camillus was in near-constant ill health himself, with a particularly nasty leg-wound deemed incurable by contemporary doctors, which gave him acute sympathy for the sick.
Appropriately enough for a medical man, Camillus was subject to an autopsy after he died in 1614. But when his heart was removed, according to his biographer, ‘it seemed a ruby and it was so large that those who saw it admired it’, and so it was decided to preserve the giant’s ticker for everyone’s enjoyment. After all, Camillus had always been praised for his big heart, so why not make the praise disgusting literal? The heart was sent to Naples, where it was encased in a glorious reliquary. The heart now lives in Rome, but frequently goes on tour.
