He added: “I never lost that thrill.”
An inveterate storyteller with the folksy lilt of his native West Virginia, he said that he once amputated a rabbit’s ear and placed it in a refrigerator overnight in an experiment to determine how long an appendage could survive on its own before being successfully reattached. The ear was sewn back on and his lab crew entered the rabbit in the North Carolina State Fair, where it received a prize and finished fourth in best-in-show.
“One of its ears was a little drooped, but the judges never picked it up,” he recalled.
In 1979, with the help of drills that he bought at Sears and had modified for surgical use, Dr. Urbaniak developed a technique to treat younger patients with a hip condition called avascular necrosis, caused by the use of steroids and alcohol, as well as fractures, dislocations and other factors. The disease occurs when the ball-shaped top of the thigh bone, or femur, which fits into a socket of the pelvis to form the hip joint, lacks sufficient blood flow. Without treatment, the dead bone can crumble, leading to the collapse of the joint.
Dr. Urbaniak’s solution was to take a roughly four-inch piece of the fibula — the non-weight-bearing bone in the lower leg — and graft it, with its attached blood vessels, to the top of the femur, restoring blood flow and stimulating new bone growth.
He and his surgical team performed some 3,500 of these microsurgical operations, called free vascularized fibular bone grafts, to avoid the need for artificial hips. The procedure was particularly helpful to younger people — the average age of his patients was 33 — whose artificial hips might have needed to be replaced two or three times during their lifetimes, Dr. Urbaniak told the website Duke Today in 2003.
“The more active the patient is, the faster the artificial hips wear out,” he said.
James Randolph Urbaniak was born on May 15, 1936, in Fairmont, W.Va. His father, Cecil Urbaniak, was an immigrant from Poland and a coal miner who became a district president of the United Mine Workers of America; his mother, Patricia (Morgan) Urbaniak, ran the household.
