White House Physician

At the turn of the century, when John Willard Travell was a young physician building his practice and raising two daughters, frogs were still common in Manhattan. They came in handy: Dr. Travell wanted his daughters to become physicians, so he dissected the frogs in anatomy lessons for them and showed them the historic experiment in which Luigi Galvani discovered electric currents in a twitching frog's leg. The lessons took. Last week, to the quiet satisfaction of Dr. Travell, now retired at a ripe 91, Younger Daughter Janet, 59, became a big frog in a big pond: President Kennedy named her as his personal physician. She is the first woman White House doctor, and the first nonmilitary physician in that job since the end of Chester A. Arthur's administration in 1885.

To the Palace. No ordinary woman, Dr. Janet Travell (Wellesley, '22; Cornell University Medical College, '26) is no ordinary physician. From her father, who had pioneered in galvanism--electrical treatment of muscle disorders--she picked up a keener-than-average interest in the human spine and its disks, its nerves and its muscles, and the aches and ills that beset them. Young Dr. Travell turned intensively to the study and treatment of pain--especially musculoskeletal pain. By 1930, her old med school put her on the faculty in the pharmacology division. There, in what is now the "great white palace" of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center on the East River, she stayed until last week, with the rank (since 1947) of associate professor.

Dr. Travell has concentrated on what doctors call muscle spasm and patients call muscle cramps. During most of her career, the main drug used to relieve these pains--often agonizing, sometimes crippling--has been procaine (Novocain), which has to be injected. Dr. Travell learned to make skillful use of the so far unexplained fact that the patient's relief from pain often lasts for weeks or months, though the procaine itself wears off in a few hours. She has treated herself and practically every member of her family, including her husband, Investment Counselor John Powell, who gets his pains in the neck. She became one of Kennedy's doctors in 1955, when she stopped the back cramps that he suffered after a spine operation (TIME, Jan. 27). Kennedy calls her "a genius."

By the Back Door. Because Dr. Travell 's main treatment for muscle cramp sounds superficially like Chinese acupuncture (inserting needles into many parts of the body), some physicians are inclined to sniff at the scientific value of her work. Not so her grateful patients, who besides President Kennedy (and his brother Robert and father Joseph) include Arizona's Senator Barry Goldwater (pain in the back and arms). "I'm just going to have to work out a back-door arrangement with Jack Kennedy, so I can keep using her," says Goldwater. A key ingredient in any Travell prescription is her own personality. Forceful but warm, enthusiastic but eminently sane, she gives her patients some of her own confidence and that intangible touch of magic that is often better than any drug or needle.

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