Washington, DC was an exciting place 60 years ago this month.

After 8 years, the Eisenhower era of the 1950s was over. Ike’s time in the White House had been safe and secure. But it had also become boring; maddeningly, predictably boring.

Now, a new president was taking over who was as different from Ike as daylight is from dark. And just 6 days into his term, he took an unprecedented step.

It had all started years earlier on 2 concrete steps on Memorial Day weekend 1955. They led into a doctor’s office at 9 West 16th Street in New York City. A car deposited a lean, gaunt young man on the sidewalk.

The woman watching from inside later remembered, “He was on crutches. There were 2 steps from the street into my office and he could hardly navigate them … He could walk on the level putting his weight on his right leg, but he couldn’t step up or down a step with his left foot. We could hardly get him into the office.”

The woman was Dr. Janett Travell, a noted expert on pain caused by muscle irritation. The man she was about to see was 38-year-old Senator John F. Kennedy.

Travell had followed a fascinating career path to arrive at this moment. Earning her medical degree from Cornell in 1928, she did her 2-year residency while also serving as an ambulance surgeon for New York’s police department. Working in a Big Apple hospital just before World War II, she grew intrigued by skeletal muscle pain and pioneered new ways to treat it. Many of her techniques are still used 80 years later.

The young junior senator from Massachusetts suffered from a myriad of medical problems. He had a sickly childhood, was hospitalized multiple times, and was even incorrectly diagnosed with leukemia (it was actually an adrenal ailment).

A football injury to one knee, followed by a serious back injury sustained in WWII, kept Kennedy in chronic pain. There was surgery after surgery. In fact, he wrote his Pulitzer Prizewinning book “Profiles in Courage” in bed following a 1954 operation.

Travell quickly sized up her new patient. She discovered one of Kennedy’s legs was shorter than the other. So, she had lifts made for all his left shoes, which reduced stress on the back. She injected low doses of procaine into the lumbar muscles, which drastically reduced the pain. One recommendation even became an iconic part of JFK’s public imagine: She suggested he sit in a rocking chair to keep pressure off his back.

The change was swift. Soon, Kennedy’s crutches were put in a closet. In their place, Americans saw a robust, energetic candidate campaigning in the 1960 presidential race. Kennedy won it in a cliffhanger (it was the closest election in American history). Bobby Kennedy, the new president’s brother, even said Dr. Travell’s treatments had made the victory possible.

And so, on January 26, 1961 Kennedy showed his appreciation by appointing her the first woman to ever serve as Physician to the President, an official White House position. In a time when America just saw the inauguration of its first female vice president, a woman serving as the president’s personal doctor may not sound like much. But it was groundbreaking at the time. There was quiet griping among the ranks of older male doctors. However, Travell’s sterling performance quickly quieted them.

Ironically, Dr. Travell also treated Senator Barry Goldwater, a founder of today’s conservative movement. That made the Arizona Republican quip, “I may have to work out a back-door arrangement with the new president” —Kennedy was a Democrat — so he could continue seeing her.

Travell loved her White House job and stayed on following Kennedy’s assassination. After stepping down in 1965, she taught at George Washington University. She kept on teaching and writing and sharing her remarkable knowledge until her death in 1997 at age 95.

Time magazine expressed what made Janet Travell special in its 1961 article on her precedent-shattering appointment: “A key ingredient in any Travell prescription is her 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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