James Lythgoe was born in Wilmslow, Cheshire, on 10 November 1926, the son of Sir James Lythgoe CBE, a municipal accountant, who was quondam Chairman of the Manchester Regional Hospital Board, and Dorothy May, née Ashworth. He was educated at Bootham School, York, and St John's College, Cambridge, before returning to Manchester to do his clinical studies. At Manchester Royal Infirmary he won the Dickinson Medical Travelling Scholarship in 1960 and became a Research Fellow at the Massachussetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School from 1960 to 1961. He did his National Service in the RAD Medical Branch, becoming acting Squadron Leader from 1951 to 1952. He was appointed consultant surgeon at the Royal Preston Hospital and Chorley and District Hospital in 1964, retiring in 1991. He was particularly interested in hepatectomy and oesophagectomy, and was an active member of the Moynihan Surgical Travelling Club. He was President of the Manchester Regional Association of Surgeons and the Manchester Medical Society. He married Anne, née Melvin, an anaesthetist, on 22 September 1961, and they had a son, James, and a daughter, Alison. His hobbies were gardening, hill walking, sailing and vintage cars. He developed diabetes soon after retirement and then an inoperable carcinoma, from which he died on 14 March 1993.