James Pearse Fletcher was a professor of dental surgery at the University of Liverpool. He was born in Bristol in 1928, the son of Harold Stanton Fletcher and Bessie Florence Fletcher née Pearse. He studied dentistry, gained a BDS, and, from 1953, carried out his National Service in the Royal Army Dental Corps. He became a consultant senior lecturer in Bristol and subsequently took up the Lois Cohen chair in dental surgery at Liverpool in 1980. He had a long association with both the British Society for Oral and Dental Research and the International Association for Dental Research. In 1962 he married Judith Mary Abbott. Fletcher died on 8 January 2013. He was 85.