John of God

João Cidade was born in 1495 at Montemor-o-Novo in Portugal. As a boy he left home and grew up in Castile, where he worked as a shepherd and later served as a soldier in Spanish campaigns. In his forties, after years of wandering, he sold books and holy pictures in Granada. There, moved by a sermon of the preacher John of Ávila, he underwent a dramatic conversion; his public penance was so extreme that he was confined in the Royal Hospital as a madman, where he saw how the mentally ill were whipped and chained. After his release he rented a house and began gathering the sick, the homeless and the insane, begging for them in the streets with the cry, as tradition records it, 'Do good, brothers, to yourselves.' His hospital grew, and men who joined him became the nucleus of the Brothers Hospitallers, approved by Pope Pius V in 1572. He died in Granada on 8 March 1550, worn out after trying to save a drowning man. He was canonized in 1690 and named a patron of hospitals and the sick.

Faith: Catholic founder of a hospital in Granada who cared for the sick; a Catholic saint. Source: Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)

See also: Teresa of Ávila · Florence Nightingale · Philippe Pinel