Optimal Health and Time, and Clocks; A Short Talk by Janet Travell

By Virginia P. Street

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.

After her death in 1997, while I was sorting her lifetime collection of papers¹, I came across a Manila folder which held one typed sheet of paper, a short talk that she had written and given a few years earlier entitled, "Optimal Health and Time." A handwritten note on the folder indicated that she had given the talk in Ohio in 1971² and that it was an unpublished article. I read it immediately hoping to learn more about her views regarding time. She wrote:

I am privileged to speak to you today. It is an honor which stems, I know, from my years in the White House with President Kennedy and President Johnson. The topic I have chosen today is Optimal Health and Time.

People put up with average health, all too often, and think it's normal. Do each of you have the stamina and endurance, the enthusiasm, for the day's task that you think you should have? Do you wake up fresh and rested every morning with a wonderful feeling of well-being? Have you forgotten the difference between feeling tired and feeling well most of the time.

One of society's great enemies is not disease but fatigue. This is not a new problem and many of the remedies are not new either. I will read to you some observations that were published in 1831 by Dr. James Johnson whose title was Physician Extraordinary to the King of England:

"There is a condition, or state, of body and mind intermediate between that of sickness and that of health, which is daily and hourly felt by tens of thousands of people, but I do not know that it has ever been described. It is the wear and tear of the living machine which results from over-strenuous exertion of the intellectual faculties conducted in a state of anxiety of mind and bad air. The Wear and Tear Syndrome makes much work for the doctor ultimately, if not for the undertaker."

The physician usually finds it easier to deal with acute illness than with preventive medicine. The medical emergency demands the urgent attention of both the patient and the physician. In the long-range view, the doctor's hardest job is persuading a person to do what that person knows is best for his health. Everyone has to work at it to obtain optimal health.

The physician of the future who is health-oriented rather than disease-oriented must be a good teacher. His effectiveness in preventive medicine or health maintenance lies in his power to change behavior, a person's behavior towards himself.

The question is: how do you - listening to me speak here today - arrange your lives to raise the quality of your own health? The secret, of course, is time, and especially the avoidance of what I call "time-pollution" or the poor use of time.

In the White House I soon discovered the change of the status of time. Time flowed steadily there like a great river in flood, without seasons or academic vacations, without vacations at all, and its passage was marked only by the crests of crises. Every second counted. All things revolved around the understanding and excellent use of time.

In my own family, we had a habit of taking vacations at our Massachusetts summer home without clocks - literally. I confiscated wrist watches and clocks and, since we had no electricity in our old farmhouse³, we had no television or radio. To know what time it was, we had to ring up the telephone operator.

Time was, for the moment, endless.

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After writing the above, I remembered that my mother had included a poem on the subject of clocks and time in her autobiography. She wrote:

When my mother became the wife of a New York physician, a busy general practitioner with his office in the home, the pattern of her life must have changed radically from that of her maiden years. The clock could no longer inflexibly control the day's activities, as it did in my grandparents' home in Albany and even at the farm when they came to visit us in the summer. My hostility toward clocks probably began then. Years later, it took the form of this poem that I wrote in January, 1965.

The time of my life is ruled by a clock

Authoritarian as a traffic cop.

The moving hands direct the pace. "Tick, tock,

Tick, tock," counts down the race . . . Oh, stop!

Delay! Alas, we can not stop the clock.

The future's hours are not ours to unlock.

We bow to the Clock God, image enshrined

In every home on mantel, table, wall,

Atop of buildings, billboards to remind

Us fools: "Jump, run, obey the Clock God's call."

The clock face grins but it is deaf and blind.

Not mute, its voice repeats alarms unkind.

The calendar is its high priest supreme.

Each day we're boxed in little squares of time.

Their prison walls shut out the right to dream,

To seek the truth in beauty. The gods chime;

We see the calendar and clock, a team,

Drag past the days, months, years of life's mainstream.

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Merryfield Farm in Sheffield, Massachusetts, circa 1960.

My mother wrote in her autobiography about her friends who had decided to join us as vacationers on the hill. She said, "It may have been the trail riding, or perhaps our vacation life without clocks, or even the superb view of the sunset mountains that attracted Dee and Zella du Vigneaud in 1950 to buy a piece of woodland on the north side of our farm. Until then we could not see the smoke from our nearest neighbor's chimney⁴.”

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Footnotes

1. Janet Travell had arranged, before her death, to donate her papers and a few artifacts to The George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, DC, where she was a member of the faculty for several years after she became the White House Physician. She held the positions of: Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine from 1961 to 1970, Emeritus Clinical Professor of Medicine from 1970 to 1988 and Honorary from 1988 on.

2. The talk was probably given at the Federated Democratic Women of Ohio in Columbus on Oct. 2, 1971. (The GWU's Gelman Library Container List.)

3. When I was fifteen years old, electricity came to our 150-year-old house at Merryfield Farm. In the fall of 1950, friends of my parents purchased acreage next to our farm and decided to build a summer cottage there. My parents and my mother's sister, Dr. Virginia Weeks, shared with these friends the cost of putting up telephone poles and bringing a line in from where it stopped about a mile away to the south.

4. Travell J: Office Hours: Day and Night: The Autobiography of Janet Travell, M.D. The World Publishing Company, New York and Cleveland, 1968. (pp. 61, 62).