Ignacio Ponseti learned his orientation of the foot by observing his father make watches.

His father’s deliberate handling of the small mechanical devices later helped him carefully adjust his newborn patients’ feet.

Ponseti, a UI professor emeritus who was known worldwide for his discovery of a revolutionary technique for treating clubfoot, died Sunday afternoon. He was 95.

“He died peacefully and with dignity,” said Paul Etre, the UI Hospitals and Clinics orthopaedics administrator and one of Ponseti’s closest friends. “He lived a full, healthy life.”

Ponseti was born on June 3, 1914. He was, and always has been, described as an intellectual. In fact, at the age of 16, Ponseti enrolled at the University of Barcelona and earned a degree in biology while working toward an M.D.

After he graduated, Ponseti faced the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and soon found himself entrenched in the medicine of the battle. Ponseti repaired soldiers’ injured and broken limbs. Later, in 1939, before the start of World War II, Ponseti fled to Mexico, where he was granted citizenship and became well known for his work battling typhoid fever.

In 1941, Arthur Steindler, the head of UI orthopaedics at the time, invited Ponseti to come to Iowa City to work in his department. That year, Ponseti boarded a segregated bus bound for Iowa City and became a member of the UI orthopaedic staff in 1944.

“You must be devoted and conscious of the things you’re doing,” Ponseti told the DI in 2007. “This is a magnificent profession.”

While working at the UIHC in 1961 Ponseti met the woman who would later become his wife.

However, as the couple found out later, they weren’t quite strangers.

“Fate connected us in Iowa City,” said Ponseti’s wife, Helena Percas-Ponseti.

Around 40 years earlier, Ponseti and Percas-Ponseti had crossed paths on a beach in Barcelona.

But the two never saw each other again until Percas-Ponseti’s work at Grinnell College brought her to Iowa City. In December 1961, Ponseti asked her to marry him and the wedding took place six months later.

“He was very decisive,” Percas-Ponseti said.

Around the same time, Ponseti realized a number of his newborn patients experienced considerable pain due to clubfoot. He researched the disease and found it to affect approximately 150,000 to 200,000 newborns in the world each year. At the time, the only known treatment for clubfoot was surgical repair.

But for Ponseti, “a clubfoot is a normal foot.”

So he developed a new method to reverse clubfoot. The method involved careful stretching of the child’s foot. Once stretched to an acceptable position, Ponseti would cast the newborn’s foot to maintain the position. Once in a cast, the newborn was required to wear a brace to prevent any further movement.

“Visiting doctors marveled at the how the kids never cried,” Etre said. “He was gentle and compassionate.”

Eventually, the technique, which soon became known as the “Ponseti Method,” gained worldwide recognition. But even today, some physicians choose to continue their use of surgical methods.

In 1984, because of a hospital age rule, Ponseti was forced to retire. However, in the early ’90s, doctors in the UIHC’s orthopaedics department asked Ponseti to return to the hospital to work specifically with clubfoot patients and clubfoot research. Thanks to Ponseti, the UIHC has since eliminated the retirement rule.

“He was bored in retirement,” said Stuart Weinstein, a UI orthopaedic surgeon and the Ignacio V. Ponseti chair professor. “His methods weren’t used around the world. He basically found a second career helping only clubfoot patients.”

On Oct. 16, as Ponseti lay in the UIHC’s intensive care unit, the UI held its annual symposium honoring his accomplishments.

After approximately 50 health-care professionals from around the country were educated on the Ponseti Method, the celebration concluded, as it usually does, with a race for children treated by Ponseti. In previous years, as the race ended, the vibrant children, showing off their cast-less, nearly perfectly formed legs would sprint to the open arms of Ponseti.

This year, however, Percas-Ponseti greeted the children, filling the shoes of her husband with a giant smile and open arms.