James Daniel Hardy was born and reared in Newala, Alabama, three miles east of Montevallo, with his twin brother, Julian. He attended the nearby consolidated grammar school, which had three rooms for six grades, then attended high school in Montevallo. He received his BA from the University of Alabama in 1938 and his MD in 1942 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he continued for his surgical residency and junior faculty experience. In 1951, he became Director of Surgical Research at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. Three years later, he became the first chairman of the Department of Surgery at the new University of Mississippi Medical School in Jackson and served in that role until his retirement in 1987. As a surgeon, researcher, teacher, and author, he made signal contributions to medicine over his long career. In 1963, he and his co-workers did the first human lung transplant. In 1964, he and his co-workers excised a living human heart for the first time and performed the first heart transplant in a human using a chimpanzee heart. The procedure emphasized the need for generally accepted criteria for brain death so donor organs could be secured. He trained over 200 surgeons, authored, co-authored, or edited 23 books, including two that became standard surgical texts and two autobiographies, published over 500 articles in medical journals, and served on numerous editorial boards and as editor-in-chief of the World Journal of Surgery. Among numerous other honors, he served as president of the Southern Surgical Association, the American Surgical Association, the American College of Surgeons, the International Surgical Society, and the Society of University Surgeons.