Saint Roch was never supposed to touch his patients.

According to medieval legend, that’s what a hospital director tells the pilgrim and future plague saint when he arrives in Acquapendente, a village along the Via Francigena to Rome that was buckling under a wave of bubonic plague. Even in the fourteenth century, Europeans understood that the plague was contagious, and physicians advised caregivers to save themselves rather than keep a bedside vigil for the sick. But in his hagiography, Roch reprimands the hospitalist for this warning, asking “Why should we, who imitate Christ, be so sparing of life?” Then, with a frightening certainty, “Let me go to the sick!”

Saint Roch forced me to grapple with how far I might be willing to go for the patients around me.