JFK Physician Janet G. Travell Dies at 95
By Louie Estrada
Janet G. Travell, 95, who as physician to President John F. Kennedy and his family was the first woman to hold that White House post, died Aug. 1 of congestive heart failure at her home in Northampton, Mass. She was a Washington resident for 35 years before moving to Massachusetts last year.
Dr. Travell became widely known in the 1960s for tending to Kennedy's lingering back problems as well as for her prescriptions of swimming and the use of a rocking chair as therapy to ease his pain. She believed that a rocking chair relieved tension in the lower back by keeping the muscles moving, contracting and relaxing. Kennedy's oak rocker, with hand-woven cane seat and back, sparked a national revival of the old-fashioned rocking
chair.
Kennedy described her as a medical genius at the time of her appointment in 1961. The appointment ruffled a few feathers among members of the Washington establishment, especially in the military, which had regularly staffed the White House position since the early 1920s.
Dr. Travell had been Kennedy's doctor since 1955, when she was called to see him after the second operation on his back, which had been injured during World War II. By that time, she had established herself in New York, first as a heart specialist, then as a specialist in treating painful muscular conditions.
She was born in New York, the daughter of a Manhattan physician. She graduated from Wellesley College and Cornell University's medical school.
She began her career at New York Hospital in 1927. She studied arterial disease at Beth Israel Hospital and, from 1936 to 1945, was a cardiologist at Sea View Hospital in Staten Island, N.Y. As an assistant professor of clinical pharmacology at Cornell, she pursued an interest in pain, specifically the relief of muscle spasms, an area of medicine in which her father had been a pioneer.
In 1955, Dr. Travell first treated Kennedy, then the junior senator from Massachusetts, with Novocain to relax the cramps in his spinal muscles. She then discovered that Kennedy's left leg was three-quarters of an inch shorter than his right, which increased back strain. She recommended that he wear custom-made shoes with lifts to offset the difference.
Kennedy was reported to have said that Dr. Travell's treatment and gentle counseling changed his life. In the following years, Dr. Travell treated other members of the Kennedy family, including Robert F. Kennedy for pain in his neck, which he injured skin-diving in Acapulco after the 1960 election; Joseph P. Kennedy for a shoulder ailment; and Robert Kennedy's oldest daughter, Kathleen, for leg pains.
While at the White House, Dr. Travell became known as a woman with a patrician dignity and a fey sense of humor.
She continued to monitor Kennedy's back problems. They flared up once after the president shoveled dirt in a ceremonial tree-planting in Canada.
During this period, she joined the staff of George Washington University Hospital and its medical school, advising and teaching physical medicine and clinical rehabilitation.
After Kennedy's assassination, Dr. Travell planned to return to Cornell but was persuaded to stay for a few more years by President Lyndon B. Johnson. She did, sharing her duties with another physician, George C. Burkley, then a Navy rear admiral. She left the White House in 1965 and became an associate clinical professor of medicine at George Washington University, which named her professor emeritus in 1988.
After leaving the White House, she published her autobiography, "Office Hours Day and Night." She also was the author of such medical texts as "Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual."
An avid proponent of diet and exercise, she enjoyed horseback riding and tennis. It was said that she outscored her most famous patient on the tennis court.
Her husband, John W.G. Powell, died in 1973. Survivors include two daughters, Virginia P. Wilson of Northampton and Janet Powell Pinci of Milan; six grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 2, 1997; Page B04
The Washington Post