Janet Jordan Fischer was born April 28, 1923, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was awarded a scholarship in high school and attended the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She then attended Vassar College and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1944. She continued her studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she graduated AOA in 1948. She married Newton D. Fischer in 1951 and they moved to Chapel Hill, NC, in 1952, where she died on February 24, 2007.

Janet received numerous awards over the course of her professional career. She was inducted into the order of the Valkyries, a UNC honorary society recognizing excellence in scholarship. leadership and service. She and Newton were recipients of the Thomas Jefferson award in 1984 for excellence in teaching at UNC Medical School. She was the recipient of the 2000 Alumnae Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Baldwin School. She was awarded the Sarah Graham Kenan Professorship in the Department of Medicine from the University of North Carolina. She served in the Division of Infectious Disease and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at UNC School of Medicine.

Janet devoted her life to the practice of medicine, to the education of medical students, residents and Infectious Disease fellows and to the advancement of women in her profession. She was immensely proud of her many physician trainees at UNC who contributed significantly to academic and private medicine throughout the US.

Surviving are her husband, Newton D. Fischer, and her five children Amelia F. Drake, Jeannette F. Stein, Duncan K. Fischer, Helen R. Fischer and Anne C. Fischer and her sister, Elizabeth Graf. She is also survived by her eight grandchildren, Sarah, Jake and Eva Stein, Connor and Cliff Drake, and Luke, Kent and Duncan Fischer.