The Janet Travell Foundation

Much has been written, theorized, and documented concerning the phenomenon known as the Trigger Point. For those of us that treat and study myofascial pain, regardless of our exact specialty, The Trigger Point Manual by Travell and Simons, is the pre-eminent treatise on the subject.

A Short Talk by Janet Travell: When I was growing up, I went with my family for a few weeks each year during summer vacations to our farm in Western Massachusetts, Merryfield Farm. Shortly after we arrived, my mother, Janet Travell, would ask me, my sister and my father to give her all our clocks and watches. She would take these various time-telling devices and hide them in a secret place for the duration of our stay and then return them to us just as we were going back home.

The work of Dr. Janet Travell has influenced traditional and alternative medicine and is one of the foundations of kinesiological medicine.

Muscles are different from other tissues. When injured, bones knit; if the skin is cut or a joint capsule is torn, it heals; but when a muscle is injured, something else happens -- it learns. It learns to protect that part and it develops habits of guarding and splinting which limit motion, restrict circulation, and cause pain, stiffness and muscular dysfunction, especially weakness. The muscles have long memories and these symptoms may persist for years.

A brief history of the Travell and Simons' Trigger Point Manuals: In 2018, the publishing company, Wolters Kluwer, of the Travell & Simons medical textbooks, "Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction, The Trigger Point Manual," informed Dr. Travell's two daughters, Janet Pinci and Virginia Street, that their mother's books were scheduled to be "out-of-print" on August 20th, 2018. The publisher kindly offered to send the remaining books to the two daughters, which they have done.

In the historic letter below, Janet Travell, M.D. wrote to her friend and colleague, David G. Simons, M.D., in response to a letter that she had received from him, to tell him that he had "hit the nail on the head" with his outline about how the two of them could proceed in putting together a medical textbook about myofascial pain and trigger points [a trigger point manual] which, of course, they did.

A Keynote Address: When Janet Travell was eighty-one years old she asked a young friend of hers, Peter Costa, who was living with her at the time, how she could improve the remarks she had prepared for the Keynote Address that she was going to give at the upcoming Celebration of Women in Medicine at Hahnemann University in Philadelphia in March of that year, 1983.