David Rodd James was a consultant maxillofacial surgeon at University College Hospital (UCH) and Great Ormond Street Hospital, and an honorary consultant oral and maxillofacial surgeon at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and the Eastman Dental Hospital, London. He was born on 25 February 1936, the son of William James and Emily James née Rodd, and studied dentistry in Bristol. He qualified in 1960. In June 1961 he joined the Navy as a surgeon lieutenant on a short service commission, becoming a surgeon lieutenant commander in 1965. On one occasion, while at sea in the largest aircraft carrier in the British Navy, he was asked to see a patient who needed to have a wisdom tooth removed. In a well-equipped operating theatre under the flight deck, he calmly removed Lord Mountbatten’s molar – a story he often related to his trainees. In 1967, while in the Navy, he gained his fellowship of the Faculty of Dental Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Once he left the Navy, he decided to qualify in medicine and gained a MB BCh degree from the University of Wales in 1973. He was a senior registrar in Roehampton, where he worked for the pioneering maxillofacial surgeon Norman Rowe. The rotation also took in the Eastman, Munster, UCH and Great Ormond Street. He was appointed as a consultant at UCH in the mid-1970s. With David Matthews, a plastic surgeon, he set up the craniofacial unit. When the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh developed the maxillofacial FRCS, he was one of the first to sit the examination, later becoming an examiner for the same exam. In 1988 he was the Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He was treasurer of the Craniofacial Society and a fellow of the British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons and the European Association for Cranio Maxillo Facial Surgery. After his retirement from the NHS, he continued to work as an honorary consultant at King Edward VII Hospital. He retired from clinical practice in 2009 and moved to the West Country, where he died in a hospice in 2014.