When Charles Miller Fisher, MD, died on April 14, 2012, the field of neurology lost one of its 20th century giants. Fisher was born one of 9 children in 1913 in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. In 1938, he graduated from the University of Toronto Medical School, soon after marrying his life's love, Doris. In 1940, as war engulfed Europe, he volunteered for the Canadian Navy but was transferred on loan to the British Royal Navy in response to the United Kingdom's urgent call for more naval medical officers. In 1941, he was the ship doctor on an armed merchant cruiser called the Voltaire when it was attacked and crippled by a German vessel in the South Atlantic. As the Voltaire listed to 45°, the captain surrendered and all hands were ordered to abandon ship. Lifeboats could not be launched because of the angle of the list, so the survivors had to jump or slide into the (fortunately) warm waters, being plucked out of the ocean by the enemy 6 or more hours later. Fisher spent the next 3½ years as a physician in a German prisoner of war camp, where he taught himself German, principally to read whatever German medical literature his captors made available. Fisher was repatriated in September 1944 as one of the supervising doctors involved in an exchange of wounded prisoners of war.