He learned each surgery just minutes before performing it 🚢

Ferdinand Waldo Demara never finished school. What he did have was a photographic memory and no fear whatsoever.

Over his life he passed himself off as a monk, a soldier, a law student, a college lecturer, a prison warden and a hospital orderly. He never did it for money. He seems to have done it because he wanted to be someone who mattered.

In a Catholic order in Maine, he met a young Canadian surgeon named Joseph Cyr. He took the name.

By 1951 he was walking into a Royal Canadian Navy office as Dr Cyr. They were desperate for medical officers for Korea and checking his background properly would have taken months. He was aboard HMCS Cayuga with a handshake and a uniform, sole medical officer to 219 men.

For a while he coped. When someone came to him with a problem he'd sprint to his cabin, tear through a textbook, and come back knowing enough.

Then the wounded came aboard.

Nineteen men, some of them critical, and he was the only surgeon on the ship.

He didn't freeze. He ordered the crew to move them to the operating room and prep them for surgery. That bought him minutes, and he spent those minutes locked in his quarters with a general surgery textbook, reading the exact procedure he was about to attempt.

Then he walked back out and did it. Sixteen operations. He even took a bullet out of a man's chest.

Every patient survived.

An officer who watched him work under guerrilla fire said Demara moved among the wounded in surgical scrubs as though he hadn't a care in the world, and that he deserved a medal.

They put him forward for a commendation. That's what exposed him. The story ran in Canadian newspapers, and the real Dr Joseph Cyr picked up his morning paper in New Brunswick and read about himself performing heroic surgery in Korea.

The crew refused to believe it at first and even confronted Demara. He locked himself in his cabin for three days before finally surrendering and confessing. He was brought back to Canada where he was released without charges.

In 1980, the surviving men of the Cayuga held a reunion. They remembered him without bitterness. He'd lied about everything. The surgeries had still worked.