When he died on May 10, 1927, in his home on Barry Avenue in Chicago, Doctor Camillo Eugene Volini had cared for Chicagoans from all walks of life for almost 40 years. Rich and poor, Italian immigrants and merchants, men and women in society and in the City's ghettos were proud to call him their doctor, advisor and friend.
The son and grandson of physicians from the hill town of Potenza in his native Italy, Camillo Volini had graduated from the Royal University in Naples in medicine (1885), and promptly entered the Italian Navy as a Lieutenant in the medical corps.
Decorated five times by the King of Italy during his lifetime, Dr. Volini had distinguished himself in the Venice cholera epidemic (1885) and caring for the wounded following the Battle of Dogali in North Africa (1887). Coming to Chicago, his only home in America, he established his medical practice on the 300 block of South Halsted Street, in sight of Jane Addams Hull House, where Dr. Volini and his wife Virginia Botto Volini established a fast friendship and took up a common cause as champions of Chicago's immigrant poor.
With Mother Francis Xavier Cabrini, he served on the medical staff at Columbus Hospital, and was instrumental in establishing Cabrini Hospital (1911) in a true community effort which placed the hospital literally around the corner from the Volini home on Flournoy Street near Racine Avenue, blocks West of his office.
Camillo Eugene Volini and his wife, Virgina Botto Volini raised six children including Italo Frederick, Dominick, Cecilia, Camillo, Virginia and Lolita.
When the earthquake and sunami ravaged the southern Italian coast with its epicenter striking Messina and killing over 200,000 in 1908, he helped mobilize the Italian and French navies and the Italian Red Cross in relief efforts that ultimately would draw his wife and young family of three sons and oldest daughter to work among the victims for many months during 1909.
Dr. Volini returned to Italy again in 1918, with his two oldest sons, Italo Frederick Volini, a doctor, and Camillo, to work among the victims of the Spanish influenza epidemic.
Dr. Camillo Eugene served on the medical staffs and teaching staffs at Cook County Hospital as well as the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the University of Illinois, as well as attending at Columbus Hospital and Cabrini Hospital.
Well spoken and well liked, he was assistant commissioner of health in Chicago; organized opposition defeating notorious corrupt politicians; ran unsuccessfully for the Cook County Board of Commissioners, and served on the West Park Board establishing both physical spaces and programs to ease the burdens of working families on Chicago's West Side. He is said to have assisted Jane Addams in formulating early juvenile criminal codes and juvenile social welfare programming.
Long after his death, his family remembered Dr. Camillo Eugene Volini the way the Chicago Tribune described the 28 year old physician in 1889: "…where Camillo's horse and buggy was a familiar sight, bouncing over the rutted Chicago streets, with the doctor, sitting upright and determined, on his way to a patient. His one room office was crowded with those who could pay for his services, and those who could not; with those who needed financial or moral advice, and with those who just came to visit with the engaging doctor."