The Myofascial Genesis of Pain: PART ONE
A Scientific Exhibit; May 1950. Janet Travell, M.D. and Seymour H. Rinzler, M.D.
In Janet Travell’s 1968 autobiography, “Office Hours, Day and Night,” the author describes the origins of the science exhibit and published paper entitled, “The Myofascial Genesis of Pain.” Travell writes:
“I was an old hand at making scientific exhibits. In 1944, my first experience was in sketching the Department of Pharmacology’s exhibit on the pharmacodynamics of digitalis for the annual meeting of the American Medical Association. It received a Certificate of Merit for Correlation and Presentation of Facts derived from experimental studies by members of our department. Subsequently, with the help of my collaborators in pain research I assembled several exhibits on the mechanism of referred muscle pain and its management. Seymour Rinzler and I demonstrated our most widely quoted one, “The Myofascial Genesis of Pain,” at meetings of such diverse societies as the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (1951); the American Medical Association, Section of Experimental Medicine and Therapeutics (1951); and the Academy of General Practice (1952). At the last of those, held in Atlantic City, a professional Tele-Clinic sound film pictured me in action applying the vapocoolant spray and injecting trigger areas in my educated subject, Ginger Weeks. In the movie and in our exhibit booth, I demonstrated also on an electrified hollow leg. Light exploded in the reference zone of the foot when I pressed a button at the trigger area higher up the leg. Treatment was aimed at the source of pain, rather than where it was felt, and I explained the basic importance of the referred pain patterns of skeletal muscle that were constant from person to person for a given site origin. The rubberized ankle joint of the model could be moved through normal range of motion to show also passive stretching of the muscles in relation to local procaine infiltration and vapocoolant spraying.”
Editor’s note: Ginger Weeks was Janet Travell’s niece, also a medical doctor.