St. Joseph Moscati

Who they were

Giuseppe Moscati was a Neapolitan physician: hospital administrator, research biochemist among the early Italian voices on insulin's promise, and a beloved professor whose students packed his rounds. He was a layman who went to Mass daily before the wards and never married, holding his practice itself as the vocation.

The documented episodes read like a rule of life. During the 1906 eruption of Vesuvius he personally organized and carried out the evacuation of the elderly patients of a hospital at Torre del Greco minutes before the roof fell. In the cholera of 1911 he did the unglamorous public health inspection work that sourced the outbreak. And daily, for decades, he saw the poor of Naples' back streets free, sometimes leaving banknotes folded into the prescriptions of patients who could not fill them. His counsel to a colleague, to treat the body and remember the soul's medicine too, made the holy physician of Naples a byword while he lived. He died in his chair between afternoon rounds in 1927, at forty six, and was canonized in 1987.

Why people turn to St. Joseph Moscati

Doctors, with St. Luke, Sts. Cosmas and Damian, and St. Gianna: the modern working clinician on a shelf of ancient ones. Medical students and residents. And the sick who cannot afford care, since the folded banknote is the patronage.

How to ask their intercession

For your own physician by name. Medical students before exams have a specific intercessor here. And his prayers alongside the medicine, since he would prescribe both.